Order
1. The appellants are five in number and they have filed this appeal as of right. They were acquitted by the trial court but convicted by the High Court on appeal filed by the State, under Section 302, Section 325 read with Section 149 of the Indian Penal Code besides the offence of rioting under Section 148 of the Indian Penal Code. On the first count they were each sentenced to imprisonment for life besides fine and to lesser sentences for the lesser offence.
2. The gist of the case against them is that all the five accused formed themselves into an unlawful assembly on the evening of 24-10-1985 and lay in ambush waiting for Bahadur Singh (deceased) to come through the road and on seeing Bahadur Singh they all launched an attack with weapons like gandasa, takua and ghope. The wife of Bahadur Singh (Ranjit Kaur, PW 10) who accompanied her husband made a bid to rescue her husband from the onslaughts of the assailants, but she too was attacked by them. Bahadur Singh died at the spot. PW 10 (Ranjit Kaur) furnished first information to the police on the same evening on the basis of which FIR was registered by the police. Subsequently all the five accused were arrested and on the strength of the information elicited from Ist accused Chet Singh and third accused Ginder Singh weapons of offences were recovered from concealed places.
3. The most important witness in this case is PW 10 (Ranjit Kaur). The importance of her evidence is that no court can possibly hold that she would not have witnessed the occurrence, for she herself sustained as many as eight injuries, some of them serious, during the occurrence. The fact that she gave the police prompt information which has reached the Magistrate on the very same night adds further credence to her version. Added to that, she narrated the incident to PW 12 Deesha Singh and PW 13 Sadhu Singh (a chowkidar) who reached the spot soon after the occurrence.
4. The trial court did not place reliance on the evidence of PW 10 (Ranjit Kaur) principally on the ground that her evidence did not agree with the testimony of PW 11 (Joginder Singh). It must be pointed out that Joginder Singh was cited as an eyewitness and he turned hostile and the Public Prosecutor confronted him with his own previous statements and contradicted him. It is not safe to jettison the evidence of a witness like PW 10 (Ranjit Kaur) as important as she is in the syndrome of the facts of this case, with the aid of a hostile witness's stance in the Court. Such a course adopted by the trial court had been rightly deprecated by the High Court.
5. The defence version was that PW 10 would have possibly sustained those injuries at some other place and at some other time and not when she was accompanying her husband at the place of occurrence. Such a suggestion is too unconvincing and very far-fetched. No court can give any weight to such a theory. Even the defence admitted that PW 10 sustained so many injuries as described by PW 1 Dr Magher Singh in his evidence. We are totally disinclined to countenance the contention that PW 10 would have absolved those who have attacked her and turned against the five accused falsely. Such a theory will not fit in with logic and common sense. But unfortunately that version was found acceptable to the trial court and therefore the High Court has rightly repelled it.
6. We are confident that PW 10 (Ranjit Kaur) was a witness to the occurrence and if so she was able to see the assailants whose identity she knew even earlier. It is an admitted fact that the assailants were ill-disposed to the deceased as that is stated as a reason for false implication. The incident happened at 4.00 p.m and hence there can be no possible contention that there was paucity of light for PW 10 to identify the assailants. The fact that PW 10 has so many injuries would probabilise her version that when she found her husband in great danger being attacked by the assailants she threw herself into a vortex for rescuing the father of all her little children from being killed like that. Such an instinctive protective reaction on the part of a wife is a highly probable conduct in the given situation. That accounts for the large number of injuries which she sustained at the spot itself.
7. Though the evidence of PW 14 Jang Singh (a Sarpanch) is relied on by the prosecution and the High Court to the effect that the appellants confessed to him that they attacked the deceased we are not disposed to discuss that evidence in detail now because such an item of evidence is unnecessary for inspiring added confidence in our mind as to the credit of the testimony of PW 10. That testimony has been corroborated in all material particulars by the evidence of PW 12 and PW 13 to whom she had narrated the incident as soon as possible. Such evidence is admissible under Section 157 of the Evidence Act (vide State of T.N v. Suresh (1998) 2 SCC 372).
8. For the aforesaid reasons we decline to interfere with the conviction and sentence. We direct the appellants to surrender to the bail. We also direct the Sessions Judge, Sangrur to take prompt steps to put the appellants back in jail to serve the remaining period of sentence.
9. The appeals are dismissed accordingly.