New Delhi: Thirty-five years after the death of a woman, Delhi High Court has convicted her husband and sister-in-law, taking into account her suicide note.A trial court had acquitted them in the dowry death case in 1998.“It is a matter of common knowledge that truth sits upon the lips of a dying person and makes his/her last utterances worthy of credit,” a bench of Justices Subramonium Prasad and V K Yadav observed in a recent order, directing the duo to undergo 10 years of rigorous imprisonment.After Jyoti Taneja ended her life in Dec 1990, the sessions court treated it as a case of suicide and gave her husband and his sister a clean chit. In its appeal filed in 2002, the prosecution argued that the court had ignored detailed testimony from Jyoti’s family.The high court agreed and said, “Adverse circumstances, created by the respondents, drove Jyoti to commit suicide. Nothing was brought on the record to suggest that she was frustrated with her life and decided to commit suicide and implicate them… circumstances surrounding her death are sufficient to presume that she was abetted by the respondents to commit suicide and they caused her dowry death.”The HC bench noted that there was extreme poverty in Jyoti’s matrimonial home, and she was constantly nagged by her husband, Sanjeev, and sister-in-law Chand Bala for not bringing sufficient dowry.“Constant nagging would not allow a person to think rationally; the information would pass through the part of the brain touching one’s emotions. Nagging is a very disturbing activity for the one who is at the receiving end,” the court noted, explaining what drove Jyoti to suicide.“Therefore, it would be in the fitness of things to say that constant nagging for bringing insufficient dowry and dowry demands affected Jyoti’s mental health. She was harassed with a view to coerce her or her parents to meet an unlawful demand of dowry. Unfavourable circumstances, created before her, not only resulted in her mental harassment, but drove her to commit suicide. These factors are sufficient to say that Jyoti was subjected to cruelty by her husband and her sister-in-law in connection with the demands of dowry,” the HC concluded.It pointed out that the suicide note “speaks volumes of cruel treatment suffered by the victim” as it disclosed she was completely fed up with her life. “Since the date of her marriage, her sister-in-law started taunting her. Her husband used to say that if she opened her mouth, he would leave her at her parental home. She wanted to earn, but her husband told her that if she stepped out of the house, he would not allow her to re-enter,” the high court noted.
