New Delhi: Delhi High Court Monday, while cancelling the bail of a 57-year-old private school caretaker accused of raping the minor in a Janakpuri school, said it won’t be correct to doubt the version of a three-year-old child who is the victim at this stage.“The impugned order has missed the crux of the issue, as to why a minor child of three years of age would make such a complaint and would not only identify the respondent as the offender but also point out the place of occurrence,” Justice Vinod Kumar observed, allowing the plea by Delhi Police and the child’s mother against the trial court’s May 7 decision to release Lalit Kumar on bail.It asked Kumar to surrender on July 1 and said it “appears that due consideration was not given to the fact that the victim made a complaint on the date of incident itself, on 30.04.2026, about the pain in her private part” after it was touched by a person.While the victim did not name Kumar, as reflected in the FIR, she later identified him as the offender, the court added.There is “nothing on record at this stage” to indicate that the child or her parents falsely tried to “implicate the respondent”, the court said. “However, evidence about the presence of the respondent from 8.13 am to 8.37 am on 30.04.2026 has been confirmed from CCTV footage,” the court added. It was “too early in the day to release the respondent on bail… ignoring the version of the victim,” the court said.The sessions judge also failed to consider “a very important fact that in junior school where the present incident took place. There were ten staff members out of which only two officials were male i.e. one guard namely Gopal and the respondent. Therefore, the child victim could not have made any mistake in identifying the culprit,” the high court pointed out.Justice Kumar said the trial court “missed a very important fact that the victim is barely three years old and such a small child cannot be equated with an adult victim, who can narrate the facts in proper sequence with accuracy of time. A child of such tender age may appear to be incoherent and sometimes even illogical but that does not mean that what a child is saying is incorrect.”The counsel for the accused had denied the allegations of sexual assault, stating that the “foundational facts” of the case cannot be sustained.The incident came to light on May 1 when the girl’s mother filed a complaint at Janakpuri police station, alleging that her daughter was sexually assaulted during school hours by the accused.
