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The Karnataka High Court has quashed a police complaint filed under the SC/ST (Prevention of Atrocities) Act by an aggrieved tenant, who is also a member of the Urban Consumer Commission, against the landlords. The court noted that it was a “counter-attack” after the owners themselves sued.
The order was issued on 12 July by a single bench consisting of Justice M. Nagaprasana, allowing the landlords to petition.
Justice Nagaprasana said that due to cases of this nature where “the provisions of the law are grossly misused and involving the courts, at times, real complaints from people who have already suffered such abuses will go into oblivion.”
The Court also noted that the relevant section of the SC/ST Act only referred to abuse in a public place and, in any event, the Complainant’s presence within the home at the time was “conspicuously absent”.
The petitioners had let the tenant out of their premises in Dollars Colony with a security deposit of INR 10,000. Two checks of Rs 3 lakh and Rs 7 lakh were handed over in this regard. The owners then filed a complaint under the Negotiable Instruments Act after the second check was dishonored due to lack of funds. There were alleged defaults in rent and maintenance payments, with a final due of more than Rs 15 lakh at the end of the agreement.
A notice to vacate was also served. After the landlords applied to civil court, a delivery order was issued in March 2023 to evict the tenant after the December 2022 order was ignored, and the warrant was executed on March 29.
Later, the tenant registered a police complaint alleging that three days earlier, the homeowners had hurled sectarian abuse at her in the house.
The landlord’s lawyer described the complaint as a gross abuse of law, asserting that the complainant was chronically in default on rent and also ignored the civil court order, but instead registered a complaint on the grounds of a crime that never occurred. Government pleading on behalf of the tenant argued that the investigation should continue and that whether or not to utter such insults would become a matter of trial before the court.
“The narrative is that on March 26, 2023, the petitioners came to their home, where the complainant was a tenant, and threw the abuses inside the house… If this is the allegation in the complaint, allowing further investigation into the complaint would, on its face, become an abuse of the process of the law as it constitutes a classic case where the provisions of the atrocity law are abused by a disgruntled tenant who is unwilling to pay rent after taking the premises for rent and seeks to thwart the ordinance by failing to comply with it,” the court noted.
She explained that the extradition warrant issued against the complainant prompts the complainant to register the crime as a counter bombing and revenge for what she suffered as an order from the competent court.
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