NEW DELHI: A road is a shared inheritance where pedestrians have the right to reach the other side alive, a Delhi court has said.
Additional Sessions Judge Saurabh Partap Singh Laler made the observation while upholding the conviction and two-month jail term of one Dalip Kumar for a 2021 hit-and-run incident that killed two pedestrians outside RML Hospital.
Noting that the “ferocity of the impact” was captured on CCTV and corroborated by eyewitnesses, the judge said that driving past a hospital gate at midnight at a speed where a driver cannot avoid pedestrians is an act of “indifference to consequences”.
“A road is a shared inheritance. The pedestrian who steps upon it at midnight, outside the gate of a hospital, carries with him no armour save the expectation that the man behind the wheel will drive as a reasonable man drives; and when that expectation is betrayed, the law is summoned not in vengeance but in vindication of an ordinary human right, the right to cross a street and reach the other side alive,” the court’s August 17 order said.
The judge upheld the magisterial court order passed in February, awarding Kumar two months’ imprisonment under Section 304A of the IPC and a 15-day jail term under Section 279 of the IPC. The judge said that the sentence awarded by the magisterial court was already on the lower side.
“To reduce further a sentence already at the lower end would be to make the punishment bear no proportion whatsoever to the harm caused,” the judge said.
On the midnight of July 27, 2021, Kumar, driving an SUV at a very high speed, struck Meena Bhandari and Rajan while they were crossing the road in front of Gate number 4 of RML Hospital. Kumar had fled the spot after the incident.
Expectation betrayed
The court’s order said, “The pedestrian who steps upon it at midnight, outside the gate of a hospital, carries with him no armour save the expectation that the man behind the wheel will drive as a reasonable man drives; and when that expectation is betrayed, the law is summoned.”