Maharashtra BJP Minister Nitesh Rane Gets One Month In Jail In 2019 Mud Attack Case

(MENAFN- Live Mint) A court in Sindhudurg on Monday convicted and sentenced Maharashtra minister Nitesh Rane to one month's imprisonment in a case of the pouring of mud on an NHAI engineer when he was in opposition.

According to PTI, the court noted that lawmakers are not supposed to take the law into their hands.

Later, the court suspended Rane's sentence, allowing him time to appeal before a higher court, while acquitting 29 other accused in the case.

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"Even though Rane's intention was to raise a voice against the poor quality of work and inconvenience faced by the people, he was not supposed to humiliate or insult a public servant in public," additional sessions court judge V S Deshmukh stated, as per PTI.

"If such incidents continue to occur, public servants would not be able to discharge their duties with dignity," the judge noted.

Calling the act "abuse of power", the court held that "it is the demand of time to curb such tendency".

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Rane, a son of former Union minister Narayan Ran, was among 30 people charged under various offences, including rioting, assault to deter a public servant, and criminal conspiracy.

He was in Congress when the incident occurred.

All the accused, including Nitesh Rane, were acquitted of these offences, as the court found insufficient evidence to support most of these claims.

However, the court found Nitesh Rane guilty of an offence under section 504 (intentional insult meant to provoke a breach of public peace) and sentenced him to one month's jail.

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Rane, then a Congress MLA, had called the Sub-Divisional Engineer of the National Highway Authority, Prakash Shedekar, to a bridge over the Gad river in Kankavli on July 4, 2019, for inspecting the work to widen the Mumbai-Goa Highway.

According to the prosecution, Nitesh Rane and his followers, frustrated by the poor quality of the roadwork and waterlogging, confronted the engineer. They poured muddy water on Shedekar and forced him to walk through slush in public.

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The court, after perusing the evidence on record, noted that the informant (victim) was holding a high post in the National Highway Authority.

"Despite that, he was made to walk through the muddy water in public. It would have certainly humiliated and insulted him," the court remarked.

The judge held that Rane compelling Shedekar to walk through the muddy water "was nothing but an intentional insult to the informant," and provocation which will cause him to break the public peace.

(With inputs from PTI)

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