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 accused had been booked under Sections 3(1)(r), 3(1)(s), 3(1)(t), 3(1)(a) and 3(1)(za) of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, along with Sections 329, 351 and 45 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS).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.The petitioners, however, contended that the property belonged to them and that a civil suit concerning the ownership of the property was already pending. Uma, on the other hand, claimed that the property was granted land.Justice M Nagaprasanna, after examining the material on record, observed that the origin and substance of the dispute were “unmistakably shrouded in the colours of civil 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.“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.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.Justice Nagaprasanna also observed that courts exercising jurisdiction under Section 528 of Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS), corresponding to Section 482 of Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), must examine the circumstances surrounding a criminal complaint when there is a pre-existing civil dispute.“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.
