Three people asked the High Court to make the police act, and all three were sent to the Magistrate
Fifty trees felled, a pathway blocked, an assault unregistered — three unrelated grievances, one bench, one day, and the same answer about a remedy nobody had tried.
On 23 September 2026 the Madhya Pradesh High Court decided three separate petitions, each asking it to direct the police to act on a complaint. All three were dismissed on the same ground, in nearly identical terms, and reading them together says something the individual orders do not.
Three grievances
In the first, the petitioner asked for a writ of mandamus directing the Superintendent of Police at Maihar to take coercive action against private respondents and register a criminal case against them — for criminal trespass on his property, assault, abuse and criminal intimidation of him and his family. The background involved a dispute over the widening of a pathway to ten feet, which had already been through a revision before the Sub-Divisional Magistrate.
In the second, brought under Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 — the provision corresponding to Section 482 of the old Code — the petitioner sought directions to police officers to decide his complaints about the unauthorised cutting and removal of approximately fifty old and valuable trees from his land at Village Partala in Jabalpur district, allegedly felled without his knowledge, consent or permission.
In the third, the petitioners asked the Court to call for the entire record of the steps taken and the investigation conducted on their written complaint, and to direct the officers concerned to examine it and take preventive action.
Different districts, different subject matter, no connection between them.
The State’s answer
The Government Advocate’s response in the third matter is the clearest statement of the objection.
The police had not ignored the petitioner: on the day his application was given, a case under Section 155 of the Code had been registered and action taken on it. Section 155 governs non-cognizable offences, where the police cannot investigate without a Magistrate’s order — so registration under it is not a refusal but a classification.
If the petitioner was aggrieved by that, the submission went, he should apply to the Magistrate’s Court. The relief sought could not be granted because he had an efficacious alternative remedy: a complaint before the competent Magistrate under Sections 156(3), 200 and 202 of the Code against the accused persons.
Sakiri Vasu
The Court’s reasoning rests on Sakiri Vasu v. State of U.P. (2008) 2 SCC 409, which sets out the ladder a complainant must climb before reaching a High Court.
Where a person has a grievance that the police station is not registering his FIR under Section 154, he can approach the Superintendent of Police under Section 154(3) by an application in writing. If that too produces nothing, the remedy is an application to the Magistrate under Section 156(3), who may direct registration and investigation — and whose powers under that provision are wide enough to monitor the investigation that follows.
The point of the rule is not formality. A Magistrate can order an FIR registered, can direct a proper investigation, and can supervise it, all in a forum in the complainant’s own district. A High Court writ does none of those things better, and every such petition consumes time the Magistrate’s court would have taken as routine.
One of the three orders also refers to the Law Commission’s 267th Report of March 2017 in the course of the discussion.
Why the pattern matters
Taken singly, each of these is an unremarkable order. Taken together on one day before one judge, they describe a habit: complainants who feel the police have done nothing go straight to the High Court, and the High Court sends them back down.
Part of the reason is that a writ petition feels like the stronger move. It is heard by a senior court, it names the Superintendent of Police as a respondent, and it carries the weight of a constitutional remedy. A Section 156(3) application before a Magistrate looks like the smaller step.
In substance it is the larger one. The Magistrate can compel registration of the FIR, direct the investigation and supervise its progress; the High Court, on a petition of this kind, will usually do no more than tell the petitioner to go and ask the Magistrate. The months spent reaching the wrong forum are simply lost.
The same disposal, three times
In each case the Court concluded in the same words: since the petitioner had rushed to this Court without availing the alternative efficacious remedy envisaged under the Code and the Sanhita, the petition could not be entertained.
Each was dismissed with liberty to the petitioner, if so desired, to approach the concerned Magistrate under the provisions of the Code or the Sanhita for redressal of the grievance.
Nothing was decided about the felled trees, the blocked pathway or the alleged assault. The petitioners keep every argument they had; they were simply told where to make it.
For anyone in that position the sequence is worth memorising, because it has not changed with the new criminal codes: the station house officer first, then the Superintendent in writing, then the Magistrate. The High Court comes after those, not instead of them.