Resiling by prosecution witnesses does not defeat conviction when their reliable testimony is corroborated by independent evidence.

The prosecutrix alleged that, during the night of 13–14 January 2007, her neighbour Rajesh Kumar entered her room and raped her.

Her police statement identified the appellant; she also identified him and described the assault in her examination-in-chief.

In cross-examination, however, she denied the prosecution’s account and alleged that her police statement had been made under pressure. Her mother-in-law and husband likewise resiled from their earlier accounts.

The prosecution relied on medical evidence recording injuries to the prosecutrix and an abrasion on the appellant, broken bangles and blood at the scene, and forensic evidence detecting semen on the prosecutrix’s clothing and vaginal slides; the semen on her clothing was reported as Group A, as was the appellant’s blood group.

The Trial Court convicted the appellant under Section 376 IPC and sentenced him to seven years’ rigorous imprisonment and a fine. He appealed, principally arguing that the public witnesses’ retraction required acquittal.

1. Whether the prosecution proved that the charged incident of rape took place.

2. Whether the appellant was the person who committed the offence.

The appellant was convicted under Section 376 of the Indian Penal Code, 1860; Section 428 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, was applied to the sentence for set-off.

The Court applied the principles that a prosecutrix’s credible and reliable testimony may, by itself, sustain a conviction, and that a hostile witness’s evidence is not erased from the record: the court may rely on the portion that is credible and corroborated.

The maxim falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus is not a rigid rule in Indian criminal law; the court must separate reliable evidence from unreliable evidence and assess whether the reliable residue proves guilt.

The Court referred to Bhajju v. State of Madhya Pradesh, (2012) 4 SCC 327, K.P. Tamilmaran v. State, 2025 SCC OnLine SC 958, and Selvamani v. State, 2024 19 SCC 112, on evaluating hostile-witness testimony and the effect of a gap between examination-in-chief and cross-examination.

The Court treated the prosecutrix’s examination-in-chief—where she named and identified the appellant and described the assault—as the reliable core of her evidence.

It regarded her later retraction, including the allegation of police pressure first raised in cross-examination after a gap of about three months, as insufficient to displace that account.

The Court found corroboration in the mother-in-law’s evidence that she heard cries and went to the room, the husband’s initial account of the disclosure and the condition of the clothes and bangles, and the medical, forensic and scene evidence.

Considering these circumstances cumulatively, rather than treating the witnesses’ retractions as automatically nullifying their earlier testimony, the Court held that the reliable evidence proved the prosecution case beyond reasonable doubt.

It directed the appellant to surrender forthwith to serve the remainder of his sentence and confirmed his entitlement to set-off under Section 428 CrPC.