Factual Background 

In the case of Shubham v. State of M.P, a petition under Section 482 of the Criminal Procedure Code, 1973 for the cancellation of an initial police report (FIR) filed for an offence under Section 306 read with Section 34 of the Indian Penal Code (IPC), as well as any subsequent criminal actions brought as a result of the FIR. After Rupesh Gupta committed suicide by hanging himself after the father of the prosecutrix filed an FIR accusing the deceased of rape, the impugned FIR was filed against the petitioner.

Analysis of court decision 

The Madhya Pradesh high court single-judge panel, led by Justice Deepak Kumar Agarwal, ruled that because the current case does not fit into any of the three categories listed in Section 107 of the IPC, the petitioner is not responsible for the rape suspect’s assisted suicide. The petitioner’s filing of an FIR against the deceased defendant, in the Court’s opinion, cannot be viewed as “abetting suicide.”

The Court stated that it was not possible to conclude that the petitioner had encouraged the deceased to commit suicide in the case at hand, even after taking into account the claims made in the FIR and the testimony of the witnesses. Furthermore, just because there may be an act of the petitioner to get the FIR registered against the deceased does not entail that the petitioner caused the deceased to commit suicide. The FIR filed for the offence under Sections 306 and 34 of the IPC, as well as any further criminal actions stemming from it, were cancelled by the court because it was determined, in light of the facts and circumstances of the particular case, that the petitioner had not assisted the deceased in committing suicide.