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Now, we have to see whether the appellants can be convicted under Section 511 read with Section 304B IPC. For that purpose it is necessary to extract Section 511 as under:

511.Punishment for attempting to commit offences punishable with imprisonment for life or other imprisonment.- Whoever attempts to commit an offence punishable by this Code with imprisonment for life or imprisonment, or to cause such an offence to be committed, and in such attempt does any act towards the commission of the offence, shall, where no express provision is made by this Code for the punishment of such attempt, be punished with imprisonment of any description provided for the offence, for a term which may extend to one-half of the imprisonment for life or, as the case may be, one-half of the longest term of imprisonment provided for that offence or with such fine as is provided for the offence, or with both.

The above section is the solitary provision included in the last chapter of the IPC under the title Of Attempts to Commit Offences. It makes attempt to commit an offence punishable. The offence attempted should be one punishable by the Code with imprisonment. The conditions stipulated in the provision for completion of the said offence are: (1) The offender should have done some act towards commission of the main offence. (2) Such an attempt is not expressly covered as a penal provision elsewhere in the Code. Thus, attempt on the part of the accused is sine qua non for the offence under Section 511. Before considering the question as to what is meant by doing any act towards the commission of the offence as an inevitable part of the process of attempt, we may point out that the last act attributed to the accused in this case is that they asked Tejinder Pal Kaur (PW-5) to go to the rail track and commit suicide. That act of the accused is alleged to have driven the young lady to proceed to the railway line on the next morning to be run over by the train. Assuming that the said act was perpetrated by the appellants and that the said act could fall within the ambit of attempt to commit the offence under section 304B it has to be considered whether there is any other express provision in the Code which makes such act punishable. For this purpose we have to look at Section 498A which has been added to the IPC by Act 46 of 1983. That provision makes cruelty (which a husband of a woman or his relative subjects her to) as a punishable offence. One of the categories included in the explanation to the said section (by which the word cruelty is defined) is thus:

(a) Any willful conduct which is of such a nature as is likely to drive the woman to commit suicide or to cause grave injury or danger to life, limb or health (whether mental or physical) of the woman;

Thus, if the act of the accused asking Tejinder Pal Kaur (PW-5) to go and commit suicide had driven her to proceed to the railway track for ending her life then it is expressly made punishable under Section 498A IPC. When it is so expressly made punishable the act involved therein stands lifted out of the purview of Section 511 IPC. The very policy underlying in Section 511 seems to be for providing it as a residuary provision. The corollary, therefore, is that the accused, in this case, cannot be convicted under Section 511 on account of the acts alleged against him.