In a grim reckoning with its own shadow, the Allahabad High Court has resurfaced a 42-year-old appeal buried beneath layers of procedural inertia, forcing justice to finally catch up—though limping—after more than four decades.
The case, forgotten by calendars but not by consequence, traces back to a brutal night in April 1979 in Lalitpur’s Batwaha village. Five men broke into a home, looted it, raped two women—one of whom died—and murdered another. In 1983, a trial court delivered swift justice by comparison, convicting all five and sentencing them to life imprisonment. But within just 10 days, they were all out on bail, as their appeals sank into the abyss of judicial delay.
Now, in 2025, the High Court has upheld the convictions—though for only one man it still matters. The rest have died, their appeals legally extinguished, their names forever linked to a verdict that arrived too late to touch them.
Babu Lal, the lone surviving convict, must now return to prison to serve the life sentence he has largely evaded since the early ’80s. The Court confirmed that the evidence against him was undeniable: he raped and assaulted a woman in what it described as an act of unspeakable cruelty. His conviction under Section 396 of the Indian Penal Code—dacoity with murder—stands.
A bench of Justices Saumitra Dayal Singh and Dr. Gautam Chowdhary didn’t shy away from the bitter irony of it all.
“The Court records its regret… Justice has not been met to the parties, over a very long period of five decades.”
They acknowledged that while the trial court delivered its verdict in under four years, the High Court—tasked with hearing the appeals—let decades slide by. Time, as it turns out, was the most powerful actor in this tragedy.
And now, finally, with the weight of its own regret, the Court has ordered Babu Lal to surrender. If he does not, the Chief Judicial Magistrate of Lalitpur has been instructed to ensure he is arrested and returned to the sentence he once escaped.
A cold and heavy reminder: delayed justice is not just denied—it is sometimes barely recognized by the living.