An Indian citizen convicted as a brothel keeper cannot escape punishment by arguing that the trafficked woman was a Bangladeshi illegal immigrant, the Bombay High Court has held, calling the plea “victim shaming” and declaring that the law cannot permit an immigration label to become a licence for indignity.
Mumbai: The Bombay High Court has upheld the conviction of a woman brothel keeper in Mumbai’s Grant Road area under the Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, 1956, rejecting her plea that she should not be punished because the victim was an illegal immigrant from Bangladesh [Rani Pratap Singh v. State of Maharashtra].
Justice M.M. Sathaye, in a judgment delivered on October 1, 2026, dismissed the criminal revision application, cancelled the applicant’s bail bond and gave her four weeks to surrender.
Background of the case
On February 17, 2011, the NGO Rescue Foundation informed the Dr. D.B. Marg Police Station that girls were being held for prostitution in two rooms of Krishna Building on Pavwala Street, Grant Road. A raid followed that evening with a decoy customer, panchas and NGO representatives. The prosecution’s case was that the applicant identified herself as the manager of the brothel, effectively its brothel keeper, and that the Rs 500 note given to the decoy customer before the raid was recovered from her. Two women were rescued.
In February 2014, the Metropolitan Magistrate’s Special Court for PITA at Mazgaon convicted the applicant under Sections 3, 4, 5 and 6 of the Act, sentencing her to two years’ rigorous imprisonment for the first two offences and three years for the other two, to run concurrently, with fines. A co-accused, Nandakishor Modi Yadav, was acquitted. The Sessions Court dismissed her appeal in October 2015, and her revision had been pending before the High Court since then, with her sentence suspended.
The ‘illegal immigrant’ argument
Counsel for the applicant argued, among other things, that the victim was a Bangladeshi national living in India illegally, that no deportation action had been taken against her, and that an illegal immigrant could not be believed as a witness to convict an Indian citizen. The High Court called this argument completely misconceived and rejected it at the outset:
“Just because the victim is an illegal immigrant, the offence does not become any lesser. To say that at the instance of a victim like PW-1, Revision Applicant should not be prosecuted or convicted, completely ignores the fact that PW-1 victim is also a human being. This is nothing but victim shaming. Such argument must be rejected at the threshold. When an offence is committed, the effort under criminal law is to prosecute and punish the perpetrator. The effort can never be and should not be to shame the victim. Such argument clearly indicates cognitive bias.”
Being an illegal immigrant, the Court said, would carry its own legal consequences, but would not reduce the offence. Drawing on the Supreme Court’s 2026 decision in Prajwala v. Union of India, which noted that the Act was meant to punish those who profit from prostitution rather than the women themselves, it added:
“The law cannot permit an immigration label to become a licence for indignity. Constant judgment can make us lose sight of the person before the Court. The issue therefore is not whether the victim possesses a valid immigration document; the issue is whether the Accused has committed the offence involving a human being. The Court must not allow a human being to disappear behind the labels such as ‘illegal immigrant’, ‘sex worker’, or ‘rescued woman’. Each label may have its own legal consequence, but none extinguishes dignity of a victim and protection from trafficking.”
NGO witnesses are not ‘interested’
The applicant had also argued that the NGO workers who acted as complainant and decoy customer were interested witnesses keen to inflate rescue numbers, and that no independent witness was examined. The Court disagreed, holding that independent witnesses from society are obviously unavailable in raids on brothels, and that volunteers connected with an NGO have to be relied upon. Their evidence, it held, cannot be branded as that of interested witnesses. It also declined to discard the evidence of the panch witness, a local cobbler, merely because he had acted as panch in other cases of the same police station.
Other grounds rejected
The Court found the challenge to the investigating officer’s authority factually incorrect, since an office order of February 14, 2011 by the Assistant Commissioner of Police, Girgaon Division, a Special Police Officer under the Act, had specifically authorised him under proviso (iii) to Section 14. Utility bills showing a different building were relevant only to the acquitted co-accused, the Court said, as the applicant was arrested at the raided premises and identified by three witnesses. As consent is immaterial under Section 6, the argument that ‘detention’ was not proved did not detain the Court. Noting that the trial and appellate courts had already taken a lenient view on sentence and that revisional jurisdiction does not permit re-appreciation of evidence, the Court found no perversity or miscarriage of justice.
Why The Brothel Keeper Ruling Matters
Trafficked women are frequently foreign nationals without papers, and defence strategies in brothel keeper prosecutions often turn on their immigration status or credibility. The ruling makes clear that a victim’s status under immigration law is a separate question from whether the accused committed a trafficking offence, and that it does not dilute either the offence or the victim’s dignity. For brothel keeper trials, its finding on NGO witnesses also reflects the practical reality of brothel raids, where rescue organisations are often the only available witnesses besides the police.
Case Title: Rani Pratap Singh v. State of Maharashtra [Criminal Revision Application No. 461 of 2015]
Bench: Justice M.M. Sathaye, Bombay High Court
Date of Judgment: October 1, 2026
For the Applicant: Prabhanjay R. Dave with Shankar Ambhure
For the State: Manisha R. Tidke, Additional Public Prosecutor