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8. The High Court has considered the issue whether Section 498-A and 306 of the IPC are attracted or not and after extracting the relevant provisions as well as Section 113A of the Evidence Act, has held the appellant guilty of the offences under Section 498-A and 306 of the IPC. For that the High Court has relied upon relevant materials consisting of oral evidence available on record as well as documentary evidence in the forms of letters. Before discussing whether the High Court has committed any error of facts or law on this issue, it is useful to examine the first contention advanced on behalf of the appellant that the High Court should not have interfered with the acquittal of appellant.

19. Since the High Court had recorded a finding against the appellant of causing cruelty to the deceased for his conviction under Section 498-A, all the essential ingredients for raising of presumption under Section 113A of the Evidence Act were clearly made out. But the issue raised before us is whether the High Court was justified in resorting to exercise such a discretion as was available to it under Section 113A or not.

20. That the Court has a discretion in the matter of resorting to presumption is clear from the plain words used in that Section – “the Court may presume” (emphasis supplied). The law on this issue is also well settled and therefore needs no elaborate discussion but at this stage the relevant case laws cited by learned senior counsel for the appellant need to be taken note of.

21. Reliance has been placed on behalf of appellant on the judgment of this Court in the case of Hans Raj v. State of Haryana3. In this (2004) 12 SCC 257 Page 15 case it was reiterated that Section 113A of the Evidence Act vests a discretion in the Court to raise such a presumption having regard to all the other circumstances of the case. On evidence and facts of that case it was found that the nature of cruelty proved in that case was not such as is likely to drive the women to commit suicide or to cause grievous injury etc. Reliance was also placed upon the case of Gangula Mohan Reddy v. State of Andhra Pradesh4. The facts of that case were entirely different and required interpretation of the term “abetment” as defined under Section 107 of the IPC. In that case the victim was a servant of the accused and the case did not require any examination of inter-dependence and inter-connectivity of Section 498A and 306 of the IPC or of Section 113A of the Evidence Act.

24. Once the prosecution succeeds in establishing the component of cruelty leading to conviction under Section 498A, in our view only in a rare case, the Court can refuse to invoke the presumption of abetment, if other requirements of Section 113A of the Evidence Act (2008) 16 SCC 512 Page 17 stand satisfied. This proposition is amply supported by the view taken by the three-Judge Bench of this Court in the case of K. Prema S. Rao and Anr. (Supra). Further, the High Court has given good reasons on the basis of facts brought on record through evidence for exercising the discretion of invoking the presumption under Section 113A of the Evidence Act and thereafter it has discussed in detail the explanations given by the appellant in the initial version by way of Unnatural Death Report as well as the later explanations. The High Court found the later explanations unacceptable and the initial explanation that the deceased committed suicide because she was not permitted to go to her mother’s place does not inspire confidence and has rightly been rejected by the High Court. Only for such a trivial matter, a hale and hearty young woman having a ten months old son and a pregnancy of twenty weeks is not at all expected to take her life. The appellant not only gave absolutely no explanation for the injuries on the person of the deceased, rather he chose to conceal them by keeping mum. Clearly the appellant failed to rebut the presumptions raised against him under Section 113A of the Evidence Act. Having gone through the relevant facts and the reasonings of the trial court we are not persuaded to take a different view.