While cautioning that evidence of a child witness should be considered with great sagacity in the cases in which the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (Pocso) Act is used as an instrument to accuse either of the parents, the Allahabad High Court on Thursday acquitted a leading cardiologist of Uttarakhand, who was facing life imprisonment in a case of sexual assault of his minor daughter.The doctor was in jail for over one-and-a-half years following a 2025 Varanasi court order that convicted him, following a complaint by his wife, an ENT specialist doctor, in 2018. On an earlier occasion too, the cardiologist was also lodged in jail for over a year after the case was registered.A division bench of Justices Siddhartha Varma and Jai Krishan Upadhyay, in its order, while going through the materials in the case, concluded that the mother was trying to embroil the child in the fight between the husband and the wife.The bench observed, “We would like to add that in cases in which the Pocso Act is being used as an instrument to accuse either of the parents, then the evidence of a child witness should be considered with great caution. Undoubtedly, a child is supposed to speak the truth, but when it is portrayed by one parent that the other parent had brought about injustice to him or her and the child begins to sincerely believe that the parent with whom he or she is living has been wronged, then the child begins to testify against the other parent even wrong things, believing that they were true. Therefore, we are of the view that in such cases the evidence brought forth by a child witness should be considered with great sagacity.”According to the First Information Report (FIR) lodged by the wife on June 8, 2018, she was staying with her parents in Varanasi along with her 7-year-old daughter and was working in a hospital at that time. Her husband hails from Uttarakhand and was practising in his hospital there.The FIR stated that her daughter went with her father to Uttarakhand on March 23, 2018, as the child’s school holidays had started. After a 10-day stay with her father, she returned to Varanasi. The mother claimed in the FIR that the girl was writing homework on April 8 at their Varanasi house, and while writing a ‘letter to father’, she refused to address her father as ‘dear father’. As the mother questioned, the child allegedly called her father bad and narrated about ‘bad touch’ by him and the ‘sexual assault’ during her stay with him in Uttarakhand, the FIR alleged.Despite having known about the ‘assault’, the mother lodged the case after two months, in June, concerned about her family’s respect and her father’s illness.Story continues below this adThe case, initially, was transferred to the Uttarakhand district on the ground that the sexual assault incident occurred there. The Uttarakhand Police arrested the father, and he remained in jail until granted bail after a year in 2019 by the Supreme Court, informed his counsel Rajiv Dwivedi.The case was again transferred to Varanasi, following a Supreme Court order on the victim’s mother’s application.After the trial was completed, a Special Posco Court in Varanasi sentenced the cardiologist and his brother to life imprisonment on charges of rape, indulging in the act repeatedly, and gangrape in February last year. While his brother got bail, the cardiologist continued to be in jail.They filed an appeal in the High Court challenging the Pocso court order.Story continues below this adThe counsel of the appellants told The Indian Express that the sexual assault case was the result of a dispute between the doctor couple, which began in 2017. While the wife wanted her husband to build a hospital in Varanasi, the cardiologist started building it in Uttarakhand. The dispute escalated as the wife withdrew a guarantor in the documents of a Rs 3 crore loan for the construction of the hospital. The rape case was lodged during the same period of the discord, added Dwivedi.‘Mother delayed FIR not to save family reputation’The High Court too, after going through the case details, observed that the delay in the lodging of the FIR by the mother was not because she wanted to save her family’s reputation or did not want to disturb the sick people in her house, but was manoeuvring the entire plan to indict the husband with such offences which would make him face imprisonment for life.“We also find that the victim had been with the mother since 2017 when she was only five years of age. She continued to stay with her mother till she came to testify in the court when she was 10 years of age. Undoubtedly, she was suffering the agonies which her mother was undergoing because of the strained marriage relationship with her husband, and this would have led her to get tutored in whatever her mother suggested her to learn. The fact that she had called her father by name (during her statement) shows that she had been tutored to have ill-will against her own father and that she had thus borne a grudge that her father had actually maltreated her mother,” the court observed.Dad-daughter photographs show congenial relationshipIt added…”all this, we presume, must have led the child to believe in all such things as the mother taught, and therefore this court is of the view that the statements given by the child victim in the court could not be believed. This we further state because the servants in the house (father’s place) had not mentioned even a single word against the accused. We are also led to conclude that there was a congenial relationship between the victim and the father because all the photographs which had been filed in the court showed that she was hugging her father and always was affectionately looking up to him.”Story continues below this adThe bench of Justices Varma and Upadhyay ordered that the appellants are acquitted of all the charges levelled against them.