The rule against a second FIR protects against duplicated investigation. It does not merge offences committed in another city
Charged in Bhopal, and charged again in Indore over the same children, the petitioner said he was being prosecuted twice. The Madhya Pradesh High Court holds that each incident of penetrative sexual assault is a distinct offence.
The bar on multiple FIRs for one occurrence is among the better-known protections in Indian criminal procedure, and it is invoked far more widely than it applies. It exists to prevent parallel and overlapping investigations into a single transaction, not to give an accused one prosecution for everything he is alleged to have done.
On 24 September 2026 Justice Gajendra Singh had to mark that boundary in a case where the same children were allegedly exploited in two cities.
Two sets of proceedings
An FIR was registered at Police Station Shahpura, Bhopal on 13 July 2020 under Sections 376, 376(2)(n), 366-A and 120-B of the Indian Penal Code and Section 6 read with Section 5(l) of the POCSO Act, on a complaint by Child Line Bhopal alleging the sexual exploitation of five children after they were given an intoxicating substance on 11 and 12 July 2020.
After investigation, a final report and charge-sheet was filed against seven persons, including the petitioner, disclosing offences under a long list of provisions of the IPC, the POCSO Act, the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989, the Juvenile Justice (Care and Protection of Children) Act, 2015 and the Arms Act, 1959. It went to the Special Judge under the SC/ST Act at Bhopal, where charges under twenty-five heads were framed against the petitioner.
During that investigation it emerged that three of the child victims — referred to by the Court, as this report does, only as “B”, “N” and “P” — had been subjected to sexual exploitation at Indore as well. Referring to Section 177 of the Code, which fixes the ordinary place of inquiry and trial at the place where the offence was committed, three further FIRs were registered at Police Station Palasia, Indore.
The petitioner sought to quash those three FIRs and all proceedings arising from them, under Article 226 read with Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023.
Why rape is not a continuing offence
The Court began with the structural rule. Under Section 218(2) of the 1973 Code, now Section 241(1) of the BNSS, the basic principle is that for every distinct offence of which a person is accused there shall be a separate charge, and every such case shall be tried separately.
It then applied that to the offence in question, and this is the proposition the judgment will be cited for. Penetrative sexual assault, commonly referred to as rape, is not a continuing offence. Every incident constitutes a distinct offence for which the accused is liable to be separately charged and separately tried — particularly where the occurrences are at different places, on different dates, and involving different victims, read with the provision on the ordinary place of inquiry and trial.
That is not a technicality about charge-framing. It reflects what the offence is. A continuing offence is one where the wrong persists over time as a single legal act; an assault is complete when it happens, and a second assault is a second wrong, not a later stage of the first.
The test of sameness
The petitioner relied on T.T. Antony v. State of Kerala and the decisions following it, including the recent formulation that there cannot be multiple FIRs in respect of the same occurrence or transaction giving rise to cognizable offences, the Code postulating a single comprehensive investigation with liberty to conduct further investigation and file supplementary reports rather than permitting parallel and overlapping investigations in different fora.
The Court accepted that principle in full and asked the question it actually poses: do the Bhopal FIR and the three Indore FIRs satisfy the test of sameness or connectedness?
Working through the authorities — including State of Rajasthan v. Surendra Singh Rathore, 2025 INSC 248, which collects the flexibility the rule has acquired, and Anju Chaudhary v. State of U.P., (2013) 6 SCC 384, which examined the concept of a second FIR at length — the Court held that on their contents the Indore FIRs do not satisfy that test. They concern different occurrences at a different place, and the later matter was found to be wider in scope than the earlier one.
So the rule was not engaged. Where the second FIR is about a different transaction, registering it is not duplication; it is the ordinary operation of Section 154.
Double jeopardy, which had not arisen
The petitioner also invoked the protection against being tried twice. The Court disposed of it on a simple temporal point.
No trial of any of the offences had been concluded. Section 300 of the 1973 Code, now Section 337 of the BNSS, bars a second prosecution only where a person has already been tried by a court of competent jurisdiction for an offence and has been convicted or acquitted of it. Similarly, the test under Article 20(2) of the Constitution — “prosecuted and punished” — was not satisfied.
Both protections attach to a completed proceeding. A person facing two pending prosecutions is not in double jeopardy; he may be later, if one concludes and the other then proceeds on the same offence, and that is when the objection can be taken.
The order
Holding that the challenge did not persuade it to invoke the powers under Article 226, and referring to the Supreme Court’s decision in Pradnya Pranjal Kulkarni v. State of Maharashtra, 2025 LiveLaw (SC) 875 on the exercise of that jurisdiction, the Court dismissed the writ petition.
The judgment leaves the petitioner facing both sets of proceedings, and says nothing about the strength of either — a quashing petition being decided on whether the proceedings can lawfully continue, not on whether they will succeed.
Its wider significance is for offences that span locations. Where a course of conduct against the same victims crosses district or State lines, the accused will often argue that one investigation must cover everything. This judgment holds the opposite where the offence is not a continuing one: the place where each offence was committed determines where it is tried, and the bar on a second FIR does not travel with the accused from one city to the next.