A closed issue cannot be re-agitated through successive petitions, and delay is for the trial
Justice Jai Kumar Pillai refused to quash a sessions trial, holding that the sixteen-year delay and the genuineness of the documents are matters for evidence.
A businessman who asked the Madhya Pradesh High Court to quash the whole of a sessions trial against him — relying on a sixteen-year delay, on documents he said were fabricated, and on a defence that the case was retaliatory extortion — has been refused. Justice Jai Kumar Pillai, sitting at Indore, held that each of those is a matter to be adjudicated at a full trial through the testing of evidence, that interference at the threshold would amount to an unwarranted short-circuiting of the criminal justice process, and that one of his grievances had already been decided against him by a coordinate bench in 2022 and could not be re-agitated.
What was sought to be quashed
The petition was brought under Articles 226 and 227 of the Constitution read with Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 — the successor to Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure — seeking to quash all criminal proceedings in Sessions Trial No. 96 of 2022, emanating from FIR No. 71 of 2021 dated 17 March 2021 registered at Mahila Thana, Indore (Urban), pending before the Special Judge (Offences Against Women), Indore.
The petitioner is a businessman in the iron and steel industry, resident of Jaora town in Ratlam district. On his version the matter began with an unsolicited telephone call he received on 3 April 2019 from a woman who is the second respondent in the petition. His case before the High Court was that the prosecution is an instrument of retaliatory extortion.
Shri Ravi Prakash Mehrotra, senior advocate, with Ms. Agreema Sanghai, Ms. Praneesha Nayyar and Shri Ishan Pradeep appeared for the petitioner; Ms. Sudha Shrivastava, senior advocate, with Ms. Ashika Jain for the complainant and objector; and Shri Jay Gopal Chouksey, Government Advocate, for the State. The matter was reserved on 14 August 2026 and the order posted on 7 October 2026.
The missing police records, and why they are missing
Part of the petitioner's case rested on earlier complaints the complainant was said to have made between 2004 and 2019. On 14 August 2026 the Court directed the State's counsel to address this, and written submissions were filed on 5 October 2026.
The State's answer was that those records no longer exist, and it explained the mechanism. Under the applicable Standard Operating Procedure, old records are periodically weeded out and destroyed. The empowered committee permits destruction only if the relevant complaint or FIR investigation has been officially closed — which, the State pointed out, means the earlier complaints had been closed at the relevant time. The authorities at Neemuch followed due process, placed the material before the duly constituted committee, obtained permission to destroy the old records, and a certificate was issued. The applications the complainant is said to have submitted in that period are therefore not available in the Neemuch police records, and the certificate now on the file was prepared solely on the information the complainant gave the Indore police.
A grievance already decided
The petitioner also complained that certain documents had not been properly considered. The judgment finds that this specific grievance had already been agitated in a later petition, M.Cr.C. No. 54185 of 2021, which a coordinate bench of the same Court dismissed on 18 April 2022. On that occasion the Court accepted the investigating officer's affidavit affirming that the documents were indeed perused, and held that their probative value is strictly a matter for the trial.
The petitioner, Justice Pillai held, cannot be permitted to repeatedly re-agitate a closed issue through successive petitions.
Why Bhajan Lal pointed the other way
Applying the binding mandate of State of Haryana v. Bhajan Lal, the Court held that the allegations in the FIR and the material collected in the charge-sheet are matters to be decided by the trial court, after appreciating the evidence brought on record by both sides. It would not be justified in embarking upon an enquiry into the reliability or genuineness of those allegations, because that would be an improper assumption of the trial court's jurisdiction.
The judgment then lists what it is declining to decide, and the list is the heart of the order: the veracity of the allegations, the impact of the sixteen-year delay, the genuineness of the documentary evidence, and the defence of retaliatory extortion are entirely matters for a full-fledged trial through the testing of evidence.
Order
The petitioner having failed to establish any legal or factual ground warranting interference in extraordinary writ jurisdiction, the plea for quashing the FIR, the charge-sheet, the order framing charges and the resultant criminal proceedings failed and was dismissed. Writ Petition No. 47553 of 2025 was accordingly dismissed, with a direction that the trial court proceed in accordance with law, uninfluenced by any observation in the judgment, which is confined to the disposal of the petition. Pending interlocutory applications stand disposed of and there was no order as to costs.