The message was one line long, sent on Instagram, and it called a classmate beautiful. Two years later a criminal case built on it has been thrown out by the Karnataka High Court.
Justice M. Nagaprasanna, sitting alone, quashed the FIR against the college student. The court held that the private chat between the two classmates, which it described as “Gen Z lingo”, does not amount to stalking, voyeurism or outraging the modesty of a woman. LiveLaw reported the ruling on 21 July.
How a DM became an FIR
According to the petitioner, he was 21 and the complainant 20. They were classmates and friends. He says she showed the message to her father, and criminal proceedings followed. The petitioner pointed out that the father is a serving IPS officer.
Police registered the case under Sections 74, 77 and 79 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, along with Sections 66A and 67D of the Information Technology Act. The court also heard that the student was a state-level cricketer who was due to play for the Tamil Nadu Under-19 team when the FIR was filed.
What the court said
The judge reproduced the message in his order. It described the complainant as “beautiful”, in words the court said students commonly use today.
“The trouble crops up to the student,” the order says. “A crime comes to be registered and the career of the petitioner is put to jeopardy.” The court stressed that the chat was not public. It was “a chat between two individuals”, the petitioner and the complainant. On the wording, it was blunt: “Yes, the particular word used is inappropriate but that’s the word used by students these days.”
Letting an investigation go ahead on this chat, the court said, would be an abuse of process of law, because there was “neither stalking nor voyeuristic act of petitioner or anything which amounts to outraging modesty of women”. It added that pursuing the case would jeopardise the petitioner’s career.
The state’s Government Pleader argued that the student had no right to comment on how “beautiful” the complainant looked, even as a classmate. The court rejected that. It found the exchange was a private conversation between two people and did not meet the ingredients of the offences alleged.
Devices and police procedure
The petitioner also alleged that police seized his electronic devices without following the prescribed procedure. In court, the judge remarked orally, “When a police officer’s family is the complainant, nothing is followed.”
The order directs the Investigating Officer to return the petitioner’s laptop and mobile phone at once, if they were in fact seized two years ago when the case was registered.
