Mumbai court grants bail to Srishti Tuli’s friend

Mumbai:

A court here on Friday granted bail to Aditya Pandit, the jailed boyfriend of an Air India pilot who allegedly committed suicide last month.

Pilot Srishti Tuli (25), who lived in a rented apartment in Kanakia Rain Forest building in Marol area, was found dead in the early hours of November 25.

A day later, police arrested her friend Pandit (27) and charged him with abetment to suicide under Section 108 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS).

His bail application was approved by Additional Sessions Judge (Dindoshi Court) TT Aglawe. However, the detailed order is not yet available.

The complaint filed by Tuli’s father stated that the accused and his daughter lived in the same room for five to six days before her suicide. However, on the day of the incident, the accused traveled to Delhi.

According to the complaint, the defendant and the deceased had different food preferences and this was a point of contention between them.

Tuli was not a vegetarian and the defendant was a vegetarian. Pandit constantly put pressure on Tuli to change her eating habits, which may have led to her committing suicide, the complainant alleged.

Pandit’s lawyer, Aniket Nikam, however, argued that no case of abetment to suicide has been established.

“The mere fact that there were some arguments between the two does not mean that the complainant had any criminal intent,” he said.

Nikam further argued that to raise the charge of abetment, it has to be proven that the deceased had no option but to commit suicide.

“That was not the case in this case. The deceased was an educated lady. If she was unhappy in the relationship, she could have walked out at any time, or if she was harassed by the accused, she could have complained about it,” he said.

There had previously been neither a complaint nor a suicide note, which is why it could not be assumed that the complainant had encouraged suicide, the lawyer argued.

Pandit mentioned in his bail application that he called Tuli several times on the way to the state capital but received no response. He got worried and rushed back to Mumbai where he found that the door of her apartment was locked from inside.

When Tuli did not open the door despite repeated knocks, Pandit called a key maker and had it opened. When he found his girlfriend hanging in the apartment, as a law-abiding citizen, he quickly took her to the hospital to save her life. However, his petition said these efforts were unsuccessful.

“It is submitted that without acknowledging any of the allegations, even considering the entire FIR in its present form, it does not point to such abetment to suicide. Only because an FIR has been registered by the respondents can the applicant (pandit) come to be arrested,” it said.

(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)