A Maharashtra court has convicted BJP minister Nitish Rane in the 2019 case of throwing mud on a National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) engineer, sentencing him to one month’s imprisonment.
The ruling relates to a 2019 incident, in which Rane and his supporters poured mud on NHAI deputy engineer, Prakash Shedekar, during a protest against the poor condition of the Mumbai-Goa expressway.
Rane, who is the son of former Union minister Narayan Rane, was among 30 people charged on various charges, including rioting, assault to deter a public servant and criminal conspiracy. He was in Congress when the incident occurred.
All the accused, including Nitish Rane, were acquitted of these crimes, as the Sindhudurg court did not find sufficient evidence to support most of the allegations. However, Kankavalli MLA was found guilty of assaulting a public servant and deterring him from performing his official duties under Section 504 IPC (intentional insult intended to provoke a breach of the public peace).
The court later suspended Rani’s sentence, allowing him time to appeal to a higher court, while acquitting 29 other accused in the case.
What the court said in the Nitish Rane ruling
“Although Rani’s intention was to raise voice against the poor quality of work and inconvenience faced by people, he was not supposed to publicly insult or insult a public servant,” bench judge V S Deshmukh said.
“If such incidents continue, public officials will not be able to perform their duties with dignity,” the judge noted.
The court described this act as an “abuse of power” and held that “curbing such a trend requires time.”
The case
Nitish Rane had called the NHAI sub-divisional engineer to a bridge over the Gad River in Kankavli on July 4, 2019, to inspect the work to widen the Mumbai-Goa Expressway.
According to the claim, Rani and his followers, frustrated by the poor quality of roadworks and waterlogging, confronted the engineer. They poured muddy water on the engineer and forced him to walk in the mud in front of the public.
The court, after perusing the evidence on record, observed that the informant (victim) was holding a senior position in NHAI.
“Despite this, he was forced to walk through the muddy water in public. This would certainly have humiliated and humiliated him,” the court noted.
The judge held that forcing Rani Shedikar to walk through the muddy water was “nothing but a deliberate insult to the informant” and that it was a provocation likely to break the public peace.
