Karnataka High Court
The complaint was filed by a woman identified as Uma. She alleged that the accused, including Manjunath , had removed the tombstone of her late father from a property in Jigani and had abused her and her family members by referring to their caste.
“Criminal law cannot be permitted to become a weapon of reprisal,” the judge observed, adding that it could not be used as a means to gain an advantage that a party had been unable to secure before the civil court. “When the chronology of events, pre-existing disputes between the parties and the attendant circumstances reveal that criminal proceedings are merely the latest weapon drawn from the armoury of a disgruntled litigant, it must look beyond the allegations and determine whether the prosecution is genuinely for a criminal offence or is being pursued for a purpose unrelated to criminal law,” the court observed. Bengaluru: Karnataka High Court has quashed criminal proceedings against seven persons from Anekal taluk, observing that the case amounted to an abuse of the process of law and that the dispute was essentially civil in nature. The court further held that using criminal proceedings as a pressure tactic in an ongoing civil dispute constituted an abuse of the process of law.
The court noted that a dispute that originated before the civil court and continued to be litigated there could not be transformed into a criminal case merely by adding allegations of criminality.