The chief ingredient of the offence is the placing of a person in such wrongful restraint that he cannot go beyond the circumscribing limits. Once the door is locked, the persons living on the upper floor are confined to that flat and cannot come out.
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This will amount to wrongful confinement. No person has a right to commit an offence under the garb of protecting his property from theft. The right to protect the property from apprehended theft cannot go to the extent of interfering with the rights of others or to include the right to put the neighbour in wrongful confinement.
ADVERTISEMENTS:
If one man merely obstructs the passage of another in a particular direction whether by threat of personal violence or otherwise, leaving him at liberty to stay where he is or to go in any other direction if he pleases is not confinement.
But it would be restraint. There can be no wrongful confinement when a desire to proceed has never existed, nor can a confinement be wrongful if the person confined chooses to remain where he is. Detention of person wrongfully confined must be against his will.
A person may have its boundary large or narrow, visible, and tangible, or though real still in the conception only; it may have itself be movable or fixed, but a boundary it must have; and that boundary the party imprisoned must be prevented from passing; he must be prevented from leaving that place, within the ambit of which the party imprisoning would confine him, accept by prison on breach.
An accused who forcibly brings back the searching officer after he had conducted the search in the premises and threatens him with lathi to write and give a memo that he had searched the premises, commits offences under Sections 352 and 353, I.P.C., even if the search was in violation of Section 165, Cr. P.C.
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In Ravindra Narayan Das v. State, the High Court upheld that for the application of wrongful confinement (Section 340), it is necessary that complainant should be confined at a place where he is not permitted to move any side. If any person is prevented not to move from one side, the offence will not be completed. The prevented person should be totally deprived of movement on any side.