Filmmaker Mahmood Farooqui sentenced to 7 years imprisonment for raping US scholar

A special fast track court on Thursday sentenced filmmaker Mahmood Farooqui to seven years imprisonment, held guilty of raping a research scholar from the United States in Delhi last year.

Additional Sessions Judge Sanjiv Jain, who had found Farooqui guilty under section 376 (punishment for rape) of the IPC – awarded minimum punishment of seven years in jail.

The court had on July 30 held him guilty of raping the American woman last year at his house in drunken state. During the arguments on sentence earlier, Delhi Police had sought life imprisonment for the filmmaker, saying the crime perpetrated on the foreigner had brought “disrepute” to India.

Farooqui, co-director of the 2010 satirical comedy Peepli (Live), and an exponent of the centuries’ old art of Urdu storytelling called Dastangoi, was accused of raping the 30-year-old research scholar from Columbia University at his home in south Delhi’s Sukhdev Vihar on March 28, 2015.

The woman had first met Farooqui in Varanasi where she had gone in connection with her research on Baba Gorakhnath. In her complaint to Delhi Police, she had alleged that Farooqui had raped her when she had gone to meet him subsequently for help on her research.

Farooqui’s counsel Nitya Ramakrishnan had said as the filmmaker suffered from bipolar disorder and had fully cooperated in the case he should be given a chance to reform.

During the trial that began on September 9, the woman alleged that after raping her, Farooqui had apologised in several emails that he wrote to her. The email exchanges and call detail records were key pieces of corroborative evidence presented by the prosecution during the trial, besides the testimony of the complainant


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