The country’s highest court has drawn a firm, unmistakable line through a decades-old defence — a claim that a trace of smegma could somehow rewrite the events of 1993. It didn’t work then, and it certainly didn’t work now.
A man convicted of raping a minor more than thirty years ago has been ordered to return to jail within four weeks, after the Supreme Court refused to trim even a day off the mandatory seven-year sentence. The fact that he is now around fifty and married did nothing to soften the bench’s stance.
The Court reminded that, at the time of the crime, the law left no room for discretion: seven years was the floor, not a suggestion.
The convict’s journey through the legal system began with a Jalandhar court’s verdict in 1994, later reinforced by the Punjab and Haryana High Court. His long-pending appeal reached the Supreme Court in 2013, and though his sentence was suspended in 2014, the final word has now arrived — and it’s a rejection.
One of the arguments placed before the Court was that the presence of smegma during medical examination proved that no sexual act had taken place. The bench brushed this aside after examining medical jurisprudence, noting that smegma can appear within a day without bathing and has no decisive link to whether penetration occurred. And in law, even penetration alone constitutes rape.
Adding to that, the Court pointed out that the accused and the minor had been together for nearly two weeks before they were found, making it impossible to pinpoint the timing of the assault.
Another attempt to weaken the case — the claim that the girl had consented because she was allegedly over 16 — also collapsed. The Court placed its weight on the official birth certificate issued by the competent authority in Jalandhar, ruling it carries far greater evidentiary value than a school admission record. With that, the age question was settled.
Nothing in the evidence, the bench concluded, could dilute the conviction.
And with that, after years of legal detours, the judicial road has ended exactly where it began: the 1994 verdict stands, and the convict must now return to serve the sentence the law demanded all along.
