It was a major relief to Malayalam film director Ranjith Balakrishnan as the Karnataka High Court on Friday cancelled the case of sexual assault filed on a complaint filed by a man. A single judge bench of Justice SR Krishna Kumar set aside the case after noting that the allegations made by the complainant were false and raised questions about the tardiness in filing the complaint against an alleged occurrence in 2012.
The complaint was filed for offences under Section 377 (unnatural sex) of the Indian Penal Code and Section 66E of the Information Technology Act, 2000. The man from Kozhikode in his complaint stated that he was sexually exploited by the director after he invited him to a hotel room in Bengaluru in 2012.
Earlier, the court had suspended the investigation after observing that the Taj Hotel, where the crime is said to have been committed, didn't exist in 2012, the year of the alleged offence, since it started functioning only in 2016.
"The complaint on the face of it, is false. I do not even say prima facie, because Taj Hotel close to Bengaluru International Airport begins its operation only in the year 2016, this is in public domain, it is four years subsequent to the incident. So, the vivid narration at Taj hotel is squarely false. This is thus a canard," the court said.
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"The complaint is filed in the year 2024 and the incident is alleged to have occurred in the year 2012. Thus, it took 12 years for the complaint to be filed. The 12-year delay is also entirely unexplained. Thus, on all these aspects it is a classic example of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus," said the judge.
Kozhikode's Kasaba police registered the director after taking a complaint from the youth in August 2024. The case was later handed over to the Karnataka police.
The young generation raised the sexual assault charges against the director after the Hema Committee report was issued, which highlighted issues faced by women in the film industry. Junior artists and many women came forward and dared to reveal the sexual assault and harassment in the film industry.
Ranjith is among the several prominent personalities in the Malayalam film sector against whom allegations of misconduct/sexual harassment have been made by their female colleagues. Bengali actor Sreelekha Mitra had complained to Ranjith stating he misbehaved towards her in the guise of a discussion on a movie in Kochi during 2009.
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