The Madras High Court Bench here has stayed all further proceedings in a police case registered against a 28-year-old man and his parents on charges of abetting his wife to commit suicide by not attending repeated phone calls made by her.
Justice C.T. Selvam granted the interim stay after accepting the submission of the counsel for the accused, R. Gandhi, that it was absurd on the part of the police to contend that the woman would not have died if her husband had spoken to her over the phone.
According to the counsel, the prime accused had married the victim woman in 2009 and gave birth to two male children.
The woman suffered a natural death at her matrimonial home at Batlagundu in Dindigul district on June 2, 2014 as she was a chronic diabetic and schizophrenic.
Her father reportedly attended the funeral and did not raise any doubts over the cause of her death. However, when a dispute arose over the custody of the two children, he lodged a police complaint on June 8, 2014 claiming that her daughter had committed suicide.
After a preliminary enquiry, the Nilakottai Deputy Superintendent of Police wrote a letter to the Revenue Divisional Officer stating that the victim’s husband had entered into a quarrel with her in an inebriated mood on June 1, 2014 and left the house without informing her.
Thereafter, she could not contact him for the rest of the day since he had switched off his mobile phone.
Her efforts to make him talk to her by conveying the message to his friends and relatives too turned futile as he refused to respond to those messages too.
“Frustrated over his behaviour, she swooned in the house and died in a nearby hospital at about 5.30 a.m. on June 2, 2014. It seems that the woman would not have died if her husband had not consumed alcohol and had not switched off his mobile phone,” the DSP told the RDO and requested him to forward the case documents to the judicial magistrate concerned.