WhatsApp chat as evidence sends law students to jail in Sonepat

NEW DELHI: A WhatsApp conversation between a sexual assault victim and her perpetrators was proof enough for the Sonepat trial court in Haryana to convict three suspended law students of Global Jindal University and sentence two of them to jail for 20 years, a rare instance where electronic data proved to be a crucial piece of evidence to nail the accused.

Hardik Sikri — the main accused in the case — circulated the victim’s nude pictures among his friends through the free messaging service.

He had also stored the pictures in his I-cloud account and threatened to make them public on the university’s website.

The messages proved the victim was under “stress” and “duress” and continued sharing more such pictures of her with Sikri. She was also forced to use sex toys in Sikri’s absence.

“The WhatsApp chats running into pages is so abusive and vulgar that the extracts of the same cannot be explained and put into the judgement and what only can be concluded through the WhatsApp chat is that the prosecutrix (victim) was totally under control and dominance of the accused, Hardik,” Additional sessions judge (ASJ) Sunita Grover noted in her judgement on May 24.

The court treated the chats as documentary evidence supporting the girl’s version.

The ASJ rejected defence argument that the girl was a consensual partner. She referred to the conversations and concluded the accused were in a dominating position because they were her seniors and the victim was vulnerable.

Sikri and his friend Karan Chhabra were held guilty of blackmailing and gang-raping a junior management student for about two years. The third accomplice Vikas Garg was given seven years’ jail for assaulting the girl once.

The three convicts have been in jail since April 2015 when the girl lodged the complaint with the university authorities who took up the matter with the local police. The complainant accused the trio, final year law students at the time of their arrest, were raping her since she joined the university in August 2013.