Mumbai, Apr 28 A court in Sindhudurg has sentenced Maharashtra minister and BJP leader Nitesh Rane to one month's imprisonment in a 2019 case of pouring mud on an NHAI engineer, noting that lawmakers are not supposed to take the law into their hands.
After the conviction on Monday, the court later suspended Rane's sentence, allowing him time to appeal before a higher court, while acquitting 29 other accused in the case.
"Even though Rane's intention was to raise a voice against the poor quality of work and inconvenience faced by the people, he was not supposed to humiliate or insult a public servant in public," additional sessions court judge V S Deshmukh stated.
"If such incidents continue to occur, public servants would not be able to discharge their duties with dignity," the judge noted.
Calling the act "abuse of power", the court held that "it is the demand of time to curb such tendency".
Nitesh Rane, son of former Union minister Narayan Rane, was among 30 persons charged for various offences, including rioting, assault to deter a public servant, and criminal conspiracy. He was in the Opposition Congress when the incident occurred.
All the accused, including Nitesh Rane, were acquitted of these offences, as the court found insufficient evidence to support most of the claims.
However, the court found the minister guilty of an offence under Indian Penal Code Section 504 (intentional insult meant to provoke a breach of public peace) and sentenced him to one month's imprisonment.
Nitesh Rane, then a Congress MLA, had called the National Highway Authority's sub-divisional engineer, Prakash Shedekar, to a bridge over the Gad river in Kankavli on July 4, 2019, for inspecting the work to widen the Mumbai-Goa Highway.
According to the prosecution, the legislator and his followers, frustrated by the poor quality of the roadwork and waterlogging, confronted the engineer. They poured muddy water on Shedekar and forced him to walk through slush in public.
The court, after perusing the evidence on record, noted that the informant (victim) was holding a high post in the National Highway Authority.
"Despite that, he was made to walk through the muddy water in public. It would have certainly humiliated and insulted him," the court remarked.
The judge held that Nitesh Rane compelling Shedekar to walk through the muddy water "was nothing but an intentional insult to the informant," and provocation to cause him to break the public peace.
