Rawalpenta Venkalu v State of Hyderabad (1956)

This is clause (a) of murder at its simplest and starkest — the case to cite when the intention to cause death itself is written all over the act. It is also a clean, early illustration of common intention doing its work: several hands, one plan, one liability.

On the night of 18–19 February 1953, Rawalpenta Venkalu and Bodla Ram Narsiah, with others, acting in pursuance of a conspiracy to murder Md. Moinuddin, locked from the outside the door of the single-room hut in which he was sleeping and set fire to it. His old servant, sleeping outside, was woken by the noise of the locking; Moinuddin called out to him to open the door, but it was locked from without. Three employees watching the harvest fifty paces away came running and were assaulted by the culprits to keep them off; one was beaten severely. The hut burned with Moinuddin inside. Both appellants were sentenced to death under s. 302; the High Court confirmed.

Whether the acts proved — locking the door, firing the hut, beating off rescuers — established the intention to cause death; and whether each participant was liable for the whole.

Convictions and death sentences affirmed. Locking a sleeping man into his hut and setting it alight admits of only one reading: a direct intention to cause death. The assault on the would-be rescuers sealed the inference — the plan required the fire to finish its work. And since the acts were done in furtherance of the common intention of all, each participant answered for the murder as if he had done it alone.

Map it precisely: the murder is s. 101(a) ("with the intention of causing death") punished under s. 103(1); the joint liability is s. 3(5), the common-intention rule relocated into the General Explanations. The facts also illustrate why the exceptions could never run: no provocation, no sudden fight — premeditation from the first turn of the lock.