Maharashtra Minister Nitesh Rane gets 1-month jail, court suspends sentence for time to appeal | Mumbai News
3 min readMumbaiApr 28, 2026 02:43 AM IST
A sessions court in Sindhudurg Monday sentenced Maharashtra minister and BJP leader Nitesh Rane to one-month jail in a case over pouring muddy water on a sub-divisional engineer of the NHAI in 2019.
The court also imposed a fine of Rs 1 lakh on Rane, of which Rs 50,000 has to be paid to the engineer as compensation. The court suspended the sentence, granting Rane time to file an appeal.
Rane and 29 others were booked for the incident which took place on July 4, 2019, at Kankavali in Konkan, during an inspection of the roads.
The court said that even though there were complaints on the poor quality of the roads, law makers are not supposed to take law into their hands.
“Even though his (Rane) intention was to raise voice against the poor quality of work and inconvenience faced by the public, he was not supposed to humiliate, insult a public servant in public. If such incidents continue to occur, public servants would not be able to discharge their duties with dignity. It is abuse of power,” additional sessions judge, Sindhudurg-Oros, V S Deshmukh said.
While the others were acquitted of all charges, Rane was convicted under section 504 (intentional insult with intent to provoke breach of peace) of the IPC. He was acquitted of all the other charges, including use of criminal force against a public servant, unlawful assembly, criminal conspiracy and criminal intimidation.
The engineer, Prakash Shedekar, had said in his complaint he was inspecting the road widening of NH 66, when Rane reached. He expressed disappointment with the work and he and his supporters poured buckets of muddy water on him, the police had alleged. One of the men also assaulted him, the complaint had said.
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The court said Rane’s act to make the engineer walk through muddy water, would have certainly humiliated and insulted him and thus was an “intentional insult to provoke breach of peace”, although the engineer did not act on it.
The court said live video recording of the alleged incident was not brought on record, although it could have been the “best evidence”. “According to him (complainant), on pouring of muddy water on him, he was in a semi-conscious state and unable to identify who poured it,” the court said.
