In a recent judgment, the Nagpur bench of the Bombay High Court acquitted a 35-year-old man who had been found guilty of molesting a 17-year-old girl back in 2015, on the grounds that saying ‘I love you’ doesn’t by itself amount to a ‘sexual intent’. The ruling, given by Justice Urmila Joshi-Phalke on Monday, pointed out that such a confession of feeling cannot be treated as an act meant to offend a woman’s modesty. She explained that a sexual act involves inappropriate touching, indecent gestures, or remarks, and forcible disrobing.
According to the complaint, the man approached the girl in Nagpur while she was walking home from school. He is said to have held her hand, asked for her name, and then said, ‘I love you’. The girl went home, told her father what happened, and soon after, a First Information Report (FIR) was filed. In 2017, a sessions court in Nagpur found him guilty under the Indian Penal Code and the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) law and sentenced him to three years behind bars.
The High Court, however, set aside the earlier conviction, pointing out that nothing in the incident showed the accused actually planned to establish sexual contact with the girl. The judges said that simply saying ‘I love you’ could not, on its own, be taken as the kind of sexual intent as contemplated by the legislature. The court ruled, “If somebody says that he is in love with another person or expresses his feelings that in itself would not amount to an intent showing some sort of sexual intention.”
