Delhi HC suspends Sengar's life term in Unnao case, grants bail

The Delhi High Court on Tuesday suspended the life imprisonment sentence of former Bharatiya Janata Party legislator Kuldeep Singh Sengar in the 2017 Unnao rape case involving a minor girl, granting him bail pending the outcome of his appeal. The decision came during a hearing on Sengar's challenge to his 2019 conviction, though he remains incarcerated due to a separate 10-year sentence for the custodial death of the victim's father.

A division bench of Justices Subramonium Prasad and Harish Vaidyanathan observed that Sengar, who was an MLA at the time of the offense, did not qualify as a public servant under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences Act, or POCSO Act. This ruling rejected the trial court's earlier application of stricter provisions for aggravated penetrative sexual assault under Section 5 of the POCSO Act, which carries a minimum 20-year term extendable to life imprisonment. The High Court noted that the POCSO Act borrows definitions from the Indian Penal Code, under which elected representatives like MLAs are not classified as public servants. The trial court had drawn on the Prevention of Corruption Act to include MLAs in that category, but the bench...