The Delhi High Court’s decision of December 23, 2025, suspending the sentence of Kuldeep Singh Sengar, a former BJP MLA convicted for the rape of a minor, the orchestrated death of her father, and a litany of associated crimes, represents not merely a legal error but a profound moral and societal failure. The judgement in the case, more widely known as the Unnao case, is a stark illustration of how the legal system can be weaponised to protect entrenched privilege.
By employing a narrow, desiccated interpretation of statutory language to dismantle a conviction for aggravated sexual assault, the court has subverted the very purpose of protective legislation like the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, 2012 (POCSO Act) and sent a chilling message about the impunity enjoyed by the dominant castes and classes within India’s political establishment.
The judgment’s pivotal, and fatally flawed, turning point is its analysis of Section 5(c) of the POCSO Act. Sengar was convicted under this section, which defines “aggravated penetrative sexual assault” as including an offence committed by a “public servant.”
The trial court, recognising the immense power and authority wielded by an MLA over his constituents, held that Sengar fell within this ambit. The High Court, however, overturned this reasoning on a technicality.
The HC noted that POCSO’s Section 2(2) imports definitions from the IPC, CrPC, JJ Act, and IT Act, where terms are not defined within POCSO itself. Since “public servant” is defined in Section 21 of the IPC, and since the Supreme Court in AR Antulay v RS Nayak (1988) held that an MLA is not a “public servant” under that specific IPC definition, the High Court concluded that Sengar cannot be one for POCSO purposes.
This reasoning is myopic and anti-contextual. It represents a classic failure of purposive construction, a hermeneutic principle that this very court acknowledges but abandons.
The POCSO Act is a special legislation enacted with a singular, transformative objective: to address the acute vulnerability of children to sexual violence, especially when the perpetrator holds a position of power, trust, or authority that silences the victim and obstructs justice. To confine the understanding of “public servant” to the 19th-century, employment-based categories of Section 21 IPC is to wilfully ignore the socio-political reality that the POCSO Act seeks to combat.
An MLA in a rural constituency exercises de facto state power– they control police, influence local administration, and command a network of patronage and fear. Their position of control or dominance (a phrase the court itself uses from Section 376(2)(k) IPC) is far more immediate and terrifying to a marginalised family than that of a distant bureaucrat listed in Section 21. The trial court’s attempt to align with this reality through a purposive reading was correct. The High Court’s rejection of it, in favour of a dictionary-bound formality, legally disarms POCSO in precisely the situations where it is most needed.
This abstract legal manoeuvre becomes grotesque when juxtaposed with the horrific facts judicially recorded but ultimately discounted.
The victim was a Dalit girl. The perpetrator was a four-term MLA of the BJP. The crime was not an isolated act of sexual violence but part of a sustained campaign of terror. The victim’s father was beaten by Sengar’s brother in broad daylight, falsely implicated, and died in judicial custody, a chain of events for which Sengar stands convicted under Section 304(II) IPC. The local police and, as the trial court damningly observed, even aspects of the CBI investigation, were compromised. Witnesses were threatened; a fatal accident targeted the victim’s family and their lawyer.
The High Court’s bail order acknowledges this threat perception but stunningly dismisses it as “not a tenable argument to deny the benefit of Section 389 CrPC.” It places its faith in continued CRPF protection, a cold comfort for a family that has seen state machinery weaponised against them.
The court states that keeping an appellant in custody out of apprehension that police may not do their job properly would undermine them. This is a breathtaking inversion of responsibility. When the evidence demonstrates that state actors have failed in their duty, often at the behest of the accused, it is the court’s paramount duty to prioritise the survivor’s safety over the convict’s liberty.
The court’s logic effectively punishes the victim for the state’s corruption, making her security a variable to be managed rather than a non-negotiable precondition for any relief to her tormentor.
The judgment further reveals its tilted axis through its handling of the defence’s alibi and age-determination arguments. The court rightly cites Lilaben v State of Gujarat (2025) to note that evidence should not be deeply re-appreciated at the bail stage. Yet, it simultaneously engages in a prima facie re-appreciation profound enough to downgrade the conviction itself from aggravated to simple assault.
It accepts the defence’s arguments on the “public servant” issue as creating a fair chance of acquittal on the aggravated charge, a standard from Omprakash Sahni v Jai Shankar Chaudhary and Anr., (2023). However, it gives no corresponding weight to the prosecution’s evidence on the age of the victim, the very foundation of POCSO.
The trial court relied on the school admission register, the testimony of school officials, and the victim’s family to conclude she was a minor. The defence proffered a different register. Medical ossification tests, which have a plus or minus 2-year margin, indicated she was over 18. In a scenario where two documents conflict and medical evidence is inconclusive, the benefit must go to the prosecution in establishing the application of a special child protection law, not to the accused.
The judiciary’s role in a patriarchal, casteist society is to correct the imbalance of power, not to perpetuate it by applying neutral principles that favour the already powerful. By focusing solely on the technical defect in the “public servant” argument while sidelining the equally arguable finding on the minority, the court displays a selective application of legal principles that invariably benefits the accused.
This judgment is a textbook case of ideological state apparatuses functioning to maintain the status quo. The law, in its formal majesty, is presented as blind. But in its application, it gazes intently. It sees the technical loophole for the powerful man but becomes myopic to the continuum of violence experienced by the dispossessed family.
The message is chillingly clear: the carceral state will readily imprison the poor and the marginalised, but for the political elite, conviction is merely the beginning of a lengthy appellate process where resources, legal acumen, and social capital can engineer liberty.
The eight-year incarceration, cited by the court as considerable, pales against a life sentence meant to reflect the brutality of the crime and its aftermath. Reducing the logic to a transactional calculation of time served versus a hypothetically lesser sentence (from life to a 7-year minimum) commodifies justice. It tells powerful predators that they can weather the initial storm, exploit procedural labyrinths, and walk free, while their victims live in perpetual fear.
The conditions imposed, a Rs. 15 lakh bond, staying out of a 5 km radius, are pathetically inadequate against an accused who has demonstrated a capacity to orchestrate violence through proxies and manipulate institutions. They are the conditions of a nuisance, not of a convicted architect of deadly persecution.
The Delhi High Court had a duty to interpret the POCSO Act in the spirit with which it was conceived: as a shield for the vulnerable against the powerful. It failed. It chose a path of legalistic minimalism, severing the law from the social context it is meant to regulate. In doing so, it has not just suspended a sentence; it has suspended faith for countless victims who see in this judgment the blueprint of their own silencing.
It has affirmed that in the republic of legal forms, the mansion belongs to Sengar, while the victims are left huddled at the gate, with nothing but a CRPF guard and a broken promise of justice. This is not law; it is alchemy, where the leaden weight of brutal crime is transformed into the gold of judicial liberty through the philosopher’s stone of technicality. The appeal remains, but the damage to the integrity of POCSO and to social justice is already done.
The author is a lawyer.
Views expressed are the author’s own.