Judgment

KRISHNA IYER, J..- This Special Leave Petition relates to a conviction and sentence for an offence of rape. The escalation of such crimes has reached proportions to a degree that exposes the pretensions of the nations spiritual leadership and celluloid censorship, puts to shame our ancient cultural heritage and humane claims and betrays a vulgar masculine outrage on human rights of which womans personal dignity is a sacred component. We refuse special leave and briefly state a few reasons for doing so.

2. Draupadi, a middle-aged Bai Sewika in a village welfare organization, was sleeping in a girls school where she was allegedly raped by Rafiq, the petitioner, and three others. The offence took place around 2.30 a.m. on August 22/23, 1971, and the next morning the victim related the incident to the Mukhya Sewika of the village. A report was made to the police station on August 23, 1971 at mid-day, The investigation that followed resulted in a charge-sheet, a trial and, eventually, in a conviction based substantially on the testimony of the victim. Although some of the witnesses, tell-tale fashion, shifted their loyalties and betrayed the prosecution case, the trial court entered a finding of guilt against the appellant, giving the benefit of doubt to the other three obscurely. A 7 year sentence of rigorous imprisonment was awarded as justly merited, having regard to the circumstances. The appeal carried to the High Court proved unsuccessful but, undaunted, the petitioner has sought leave to appeal to this Court.

3. Concurrent findings of fact ordinarily acquire a deterrent sanctity and tentative finality when challenged in this Court and we rarely invoke the special jurisdiction under Article 136 of the Constitution which is meant mainly to correct manifest injustice or errors of law of great moment. By these substantial canons the present petition for leave has not even a dogs chance.

4. Counsel contended that there was absence of corroboration of the testimony of the prosecutrix, that there was absence of injuries on the person of the woman and so the conviction was unsustainable, tested on the touchstone of case-law. None of these submissions has any substance and we should, in the ordinary course, have desisted from making even a speaking order but counsel cited a decision of this Court in Pratap Misra v. State of Orissa, AIR 1977 SC1307 and urged that absence of injuries on the person of the victim was fatal to the prosecution and that corroborative evidence was an imperative component of judicial credence in rape cases.

5. We do not agree. For one thing, Pratap Misras case (supra) laid down no inflexible axiom of law on either point. The facts and circumstances often vary from case to case, the crime situation and the myriad psychic factors, social conditions and peoples life-styles may fluctuate, and so, rules of prudence relevant in one fact-situation may be inept in another. We cannot accept the argument that regardless of the specific circumstances of a crime and criminal milieu, some strands of probative reasoning which appealed to a Bench in one reported decision must mechanically be extended to other cases. Corroboration as a condition for judicial reliance on the testimony of a prosecutrix is not a matter of law, but a guidance of prudence under given circumstances. Indeed, from place to place, from age to age, from varying life-styles and behavioural. complexes, inferences from a given set of facts, oral and circumstantial, may have to be drawn not with dead uniformity but realistic diversity lest rigidity in the shape of rule of law in this area be introduced through a new type of precedential tyranny. The same observation holds good regarding the presence or absence of injuries on the person of the aggressor or the aggressed.

6. There are several sacred cows of the criminal law in Indo-Anglian jurisprudence which are superstitious survivals and need to be re-examined. When rapists are revelling in their prom