Nineteen petitions say the police are settling civil disputes, and the High Court asks the State to produce its orders

The Government Pleader’s answer was that the police do not interfere in civil matters. The judge replied that he is seeing a series of such cases, and called for every guideline the Home Department and the DGP have issued.

On 10 September 2026 Justice Maheswara Rao Kuncheam of the Andhra Pradesh High Court at Amaravati took up nineteen writ petitions together — filed between 2024 and 2026 — and did not decide any of them. He made a direction instead, and the direction is the story.

The complaint they share

The petitions are individually unremarkable and collectively a pattern. The lead petitioner is a man of about fifty-five from Burugula village in Nandyala district. He complains of the Superintendent of Police, the Circle Inspector and the Sub-Inspector at two local stations.

His case is that he was called to the police station in order to be implicated in false cases and arrested, because of his association with a political party and his active participation in the 2024 Assembly election, although he had not been involved in any crime.

He asks for a writ of mandamus declaring that action arbitrary, illegal, a colourable exercise of power and contrary to established principle, and violative of his rights under Articles 14, 19 and 21 — and consequently for a direction that the police not insist on his appearance at the station and not interfere with his rights to equality, life and liberty without following due process.

The other eighteen petitions are framed in materially the same way, each against the police officers of its own district.

Read together they describe a mechanism rather than nineteen coincidences: a person on one side of a civil or political dispute is called in, told he may be implicated, and left to draw the obvious conclusion about what would make the calls stop.

What was argued

Counsel for the petitioners pointed to the powers of the police authorities in interfering in civil disputes and how that affects society at large. They stated unequivocally that police interference in civil disputes infringes the fundamental rights of the petitioners and their family members, and relied on Supreme Court authority.

The Assistant Government Pleader for Home, appearing for the State and its personnel, answered — in the judge’s summary — merely that the police authorities are not interfering with civil disputes between the parties.

That single sentence of denial, set against nineteen petitions, is what the order responds to.

“This Court is witnessing series of cases”

The judge records that he is seeing a series of cases instituted before the Court alleging interference by police in civil disputes, and the effects of that on petitioners in multiple ways — physically, psychologically and fiscally.

That word “fiscally” is worth noticing. A summons to a police station in a property or money dispute costs the recipient time, lawyers and, very often, the ability to hold out in the civil case he is fighting. Where the police can be brought in on one side, the criminal process becomes a lever on the civil one — which is precisely what the Patna High Court dealt with, on an individual scale, in quashing a forgery prosecution over a family land dispute the same week.

The direction

Rather than decide the individual grievances first, the Court went to the administrative source.

The Principal Secretary, Home Department, Government of Andhra Pradesh and the Director General of Police for the State were directed to place before the Court all relevant Government Orders, guidelines, memos and communications issued by the Government and by the DGP directing police officers not to involve themselves in civil disputes without legal cause.

The cases were listed for 15 September 2026 in the Adjourned Motion List, and the Assistant Government Pleader was directed to communicate the gist of the order to the Principal Secretary and the Director General for appropriate measures. The order was to go to both by special messenger.

Listing the batch again five days later, rather than in the ordinary course, suggests the Court did not intend the direction to drift.

Why the form of the order matters

Asking the State to produce its own instructions is a particular kind of judicial move, and it does two things at once.

If comprehensive orders and guidelines exist, the question stops being whether the police may involve themselves in civil disputes — settled law says they may not — and becomes why instructions already on the books are not being followed. That converts nineteen individual grievances into a question of compliance, which is answerable by the officers who issued them.

If the instructions turn out to be thin or absent, the Court will have established that on the State’s own material, and the case for framing guidelines makes itself.

Either way the State’s position — that the police are not interfering — has to be defended against paper rather than asserted across the bar.

This judgment was published only as a scanned image, and its text was recovered by optical character recognition. Quotations are given as paraphrase rather than as direct quotation for that reason.