Throwing a toddler on the floor would amount to the offence of attempt to murder, the Madhya Pradesh High Court recently held while refusing to quash a FIR against a woman.
Justice Gurpal Singh Ahluwalia said the woman had no authority to throw the child on the floor and to throw a paperweight towards him.
The Court stated that there was a clear intention to kill the child.
The accused woman was booked under Section 307 (attempt to murder) of the Indian Penal Code in 2022 after she allegedly threw her 13-month-old infant on the court floor during proceedings before Shahdol Magistrate, where her plea for maintenance from her husband was being heard.
The woman approached the High Court for quashing of the case. Her counsel argued that the FIR had been registered by a practicing lawyer as a counter blast to an earlier incident.
However, the Court at the outset said that the facts of the case portrayed a distressing situation. It noted that the woman had thrown the child on the floor as she blamed him for her troubles.
"(She) threw a paperweight towards her child by saying that today she would kill him. However, paperweight fell on the floor by passing near temporal region of the child, as a result he survived, otherwise, he would have died," it noted.
The Court also found that the woman had already been issued a notice under Section 12 of the Court of Contempt Act for her conduct during the proceedings before the magisterial court.
"She was asked to give her evidence but she stated that she does not want to give her statement and insisted that respondent / her husband should be kept present personally in the Court. When the Court tried to convince her that her husband has come out of jail on bail just few days back and one more opportunity should be granted to him for payment of arrears but she started shouting in the court itself which was contrary to the decency of the Court and threw her 13 months old child on the floor," it noted.
Further, the Court also noted that despite the Presiding Officer repeatedly having told her to pick up the child, she refused to do so and did not even attempt to stop him from crying.
She did not improve her conduct in spite of repeated instructions given by the court and disrupted the proceedings, it said.
Considering the surrounding circumstances, the court opined that it cannot be said that the FIR against her was an afterthought and false.