New Delhi, (4/7/2019): Delhi court Thursday awarded six-month jail term to AAP MLA Som Dutt for assaulting a man during the 2015 Assembly election campaign. Additional Chief Metropolitan Magistrate Samar Vishal also imposed a penalty of Rs 2 lakh on Dutt, who was convicted by the court last week.
Dutt, the legislator from the Sadar Bazar constituency here, was held guilty under sections 325 (voluntarily causing grievous hurt without provocation), 341 (wrongful restraint), 147 (rioting) and 149 (unlawful assembly ) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
As per the case files, Dutt assaulted Rana with ‘a baseball bat on his leg’ when he objected to the repeated ringing of the bell. It was further alleged that ‘the persons accompanying Som Dutt dragged the complainant on the road outside and thrashed him with fists and kicks’ rendering him unconscious.
Dutt had told the court that he was ‘falsely implicated due to political reasons’ and that Rana, ‘a member of the Bharatiya Janata Party wanted to cut his ticket for Assembly elections’. Rana, however, denied association with any political party.
The court in its judgement observed that the AAP MLA’s legal team hadn’t produced any material explaining why Rana would falsely implicate Dutt.
It also found Rana’s statement to be generally reliable and consistent while saying that ‘it is unlikely that he (Rana) will spare the actual assailant in order to falsely implicate someone else’.
The court also noted that Rana’s medical reports corroborated assault on him and the non-recovery of the weapon of offence (baseball bat) was not a ground to acquit the accused.
