Madras HC dismisses K.N. Nehru review of recruitment-scam FIR order; State withdraws its own challenge

A Chief Justice-led bench held that a person named in material forwarded by the Enforcement Directorate has no right to be heard before a court directs an FIR, found the Minister had sixteen days to act and did nothing, and closed the contempt petition once the case was registered.

The Madras High Court has refused to recall its February order directing the Directorate of Vigilance and Anti-Corruption to register a case over the recruitment of 2,538 posts in the Municipal Administration and Water Supply Department. A division bench of Chief Justice Sushrut Arvind Dharmadhikari and Justice G. Arul Murugan dismissed the review filed by K.N. Nehru, the Minister in charge of that department, holding that a person named in material forwarded by the Enforcement Directorate has no right to be heard before a court directs an FIR. The State of Tamil Nadu, which had filed its own review of the same order, told the court it no longer wished to press it because an FIR had been registered. The bench allowed that withdrawal over the Minister's objection and closed the contempt petition that had set the three matters in motion.

A bank-fraud search, 232 pages and a ten-rupee note

The common order, delivered on 26 October after being reserved on 10 August, begins with how the case came to court. The department had invited applications for 2,538 posts, and appointments were made around July 2025. While investigating an unrelated bank-fraud case, the Enforcement Directorate searched the residence of K.N. Ravichandran, the Minister's brother. The ED claimed it came across WhatsApp chats, hall tickets, screenshots and what the bench called a curious method of using a Rs 10 currency note to mark and track payments, all suggesting the recruitment had been rigged. On 27 October 2025 the ED forwarded this material, about 232 pages, to the Director General of Police under Section 66(2) of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, for whatever action the State thought fit.

No action followed. I.S. Inbadurai, a Rajya Sabha member and practising advocate, sent a representation to the Director of the DVAC on 13 December 2025 asking for an FIR against the Minister and the others named in the ED material. That drew no response either, and he filed W.P.(Crl) No. 74 of 2026 seeking a mandamus for registration of a case and a fair investigation.

On 20 February 2026 the same bench directed the DVAC to register a case forthwith on the information the ED had shared and conduct a detailed and expeditious investigation. It recorded that it was prima facie satisfied the investigation could have gone to an independent specialised agency, but left it with the Vigilance Department since the State had entrusted the matter there. It also rejected the objection that Inbadurai, not being the source of the allegations, could not maintain the petition: the material came from a statutory investigating agency rather than a bald allegation, and the court preferred to examine the matter on its merits.

Three petitions from one February order

Inbadurai filed Cont.P. No. 872 of 2026 against A.T. Durai Kumar, IPS, the In-Charge Director of the DVAC. The DVAC had formally received and acknowledged his representation on 25 February 2026, five days after the order, yet no FIR followed, no reply came to a legal notice of the same date, and every day of delay, he said, increased the risk of evidence being tampered with or destroyed.

The State answered with a review, Rev.Aplwp Crl. No. 2 of 2026, under Order XLVII Rule 1 of the Civil Procedure Code read with Section 114 and Article 226. Its grounds were that Section 66(2) of the PMLA only lets one authority share information with another and does not compel registration of a case without the State applying its own mind; that a writ court does not ordinarily direct an FIR, the remedy lying before the jurisdictional Magistrate under Section 175(3) of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, the successor to Section 156(3) of the Cr.P.C.; that Inbadurai was not really a complainant; and that a detailed enquiry against the persons named had already been registered on 12 December 2025, with prior approval under Section 17-A of the Prevention of Corruption Act, and was alive when the order was passed. It relied on Lalita Kumari v. Government of U.P., which lists corruption among the categories where a preliminary enquiry may precede an FIR, and on XXX v. State of Kerala, a 2026 Supreme Court judgment holding that Section 175(4) of the BNSS requires the competent authority to obtain a report from the public servant's superior and hear him before directing an investigation.

Nehru, the fifth respondent in the writ petition, filed Rev.Aplwp Crl. No. 3 of 2026 on two grounds: he was not given a hearing, and the direction to register an FIR was wrong. On the first, he said that on 28 January 2026 the court had left open whether notice should go to him, saying the issue would be considered at the appropriate stage. That question was never decided. A notice was issued on 2 February and reached him on 4 February at 1.47 p.m., the very day the case was reserved for orders, leaving him no real chance to answer the adverse material recorded against him and his relatives.

On the merits he argued that the predicate offence and the ECIR against Ravichandran had been quashed and the seized material returned, so the ED had become functus officio and its 27 October 2025 communication could trigger nothing. A Section 17-A enquiry was already in progress. Section 175(4) of the BNSS required him to be heard. A mandamus was not the ordinary remedy for compelling an FIR, and Inbadurai, a political rival with no personal stake, had no standing to set the criminal law in motion. Of three FIRs said to have been registered on the ED material, only two had been made available to him.

Mr Siddarth Luthra and Mr P.H. Arvindh Pandian, Senior Counsel, appeared for Nehru, instructed by Mr Abishek Jenasenan. They took the bench through Rules 3(7), 17(3), 20, 24, 25 and 29 of the Madras High Court Writ Rules, 2021, to show that the Rules expressly provide for review of an order in a writ petition without excluding one of a criminal nature. An application sought to amend the prayer to seek review and/or recall. In written arguments the Minister said that what was actually argued was confined to one point: he was denied a hearing before an order prejudicial to him was passed, and that alone justified recalling it.

The State changes its mind, and Luthra objects

When the matters were taken up, Mr Vijay Narayan, Advocate General, assisted by Mr J. Lenin, Special Government Pleader, and Mr Akash Srinanda, Government Advocate, stated on instructions that the Government did not wish to press its review. An FIR had been registered on the court's direction and no precipitative action had been taken.

Mr Luthra resisted. The State had taken a considered stand that Section 66(2) does not compel an FIR, that the remedy lay under Section 175(3), and that a Section 17-A enquiry was under way; it could not abandon that stand on a mere change of the Government in office. He called it approbating and reprobating, and relied on A.P. Dairy Development Corpn. Federation v. B. Narasimha Reddy and State of T.N. v. K. Shyam Sunder for the rule that the State, as a continuing body under Article 12, must ordinarily carry forward the stand of a previous Government.

The bench disagreed. It set out paragraph 40 of A.P. Dairy Development Corpn., which says a succeeding Government is duty-bound to carry on the unfinished job of the previous one, but also that where an enquiry shows the earlier action was not in conformity with law, estoppel does not apply. Those decisions caution against a change of position for its own sake, to serve a political interest at the expense of legality. They do not forbid surrendering a legally doubtful objection in favour of compliance with a court order. Continuing to resist registration after the Government itself had dropped the objection, the bench said, would undermine the rule of law far more severely than relinquishing the challenge.

In any event, the bench said, the question did not turn on comparing the two Governments' positions. A litigant, including the State, remains free to withdraw a proceeding it has instituted. The doctrine Mr Luthra invoked restrains a party from taking inconsistent positions against another party to secure an advantage, not from abandoning an objection it no longer considers sustainable. Kedar Nath Yadav v. State of W.B., also cited, holds that a State can depart from its stand where material shows the earlier action was illegal, and the bench saw nothing in the record to suggest the State's earlier resistance rested on ground so solid that giving it up called for scrutiny. Rev.A. No. 2 of 2026 was permitted to be withdrawn.

The same assurance covered the contempt petition. Mr John Sathiyan, Public Prosecutor, assisted by Mr Arun Anbumani, said the case had been registered and the investigation would go forward without further delay. Mr S. Tamilselvan, for Inbadurai, pointed to the hardship the delay had caused but did not press for a punitive order and left the matter to the court.

Can a criminal writ order be reviewed at all?

Before reaching the Minister's grievance the bench had to deal with a threshold objection from the other side. Mr Siddhartha Dave, Senior Counsel for the DVAC, and the Advocate General argued that no review lay. The order had finally decided the writ petition and directed a case to be registered, with criminal and not civil consequences. Order XLVII Rule 1, framed for civil proceedings, had no place in a criminal matter, and Section 362 of the Cr.P.C., now Section 403 of the BNSS, bars a criminal court from altering or reviewing its judgment, a bar that Section 482 could not bypass. Recall had been permitted only for orders dismissed in limine or for non-prosecution, where nothing was decided on merits. Mr Dave added that the Minister, having been named in the FIR, remained free to challenge it in the ordinary course, and that to hold otherwise would mean no FIR could ever be registered without first hearing every person likely to be named in it.

The bench rejected the objection. The order under review was not passed by a criminal court trying a criminal case. It was passed under Article 226, on a petition titled W.P.(Crl.) only because Rule 3(7) of the Writ Rules requires a petition whose cause of action relates to criminal proceedings to be so titled. Rule 1(4) applies the Rules to every Article 226 petition, civil or criminal in complexion. Rule 29(1) provides in terms that the court may review its orders on the Order XLVII Rule 1 grounds, and Rule 25(1) contemplates hearing any person who desires to be heard even if not served with notice. The Rules were framed by the court itself under Article 225 and Clause 37 of the Letters Patent, and nowhere exclude a W.P.(Crl.) from Rule 29. Sections 362 and 403 bar a court exercising jurisdiction under the Code from reviewing its judgment; neither can cut down a review under the court's own Rules in a writ jurisdiction the Code neither creates nor can curtail. This matched the Division Bench ruling in D. Kumar v. Raichand Daga, which affirms that the High Court as a court of record may recall a writ order passed without hearing a person it affects, and Vishnu Agarwal v. State of Uttar Pradesh, which holds Section 362 is no bar to such a recall. The Minister's review was maintainable under Rule 29.

Nor was recall confined to in limine dismissals. That may be a familiar occasion for it, but neither Rule 29 nor the cases limit the power to that occasion. The real question on any application founded on denial of hearing is whether the person complaining was entitled to a hearing and was denied it, not the stage at which the order decided matters on merits.

Sixteen days of silence

On that footing two things weighed with the bench. First, the order was reserved on 4 February and pronounced on 20 February. If the Minister, once notice reached him, wished to bring anything to the court's attention, nothing stopped him from moving an application in that window of sixteen days. No such attempt was made. This fortified the Advocate General's submission that the review applicant “sat by and watched the proceedings before complaining”. The Advocate General had argued that the senior-most Minister in the then Government, in a matter under continuous public and press attention, could not credibly claim to have been unaware of the proceedings.

Second, all the court had directed was registration of a case and an investigation. It did not, and at that stage could not, decide anyone's guilt. The observations in the February order record the ED's case, not any conclusion of the court on it. Whether the material holds up, and whether the Minister or his relatives had any part in what is alleged, are questions for the investigation and then for a criminal court.

Succinctly put, a direction to register an FIR is not a finding against anyone.

It only starts the process, and it is during the investigation, and at trial if matters go that far, that the Minister will have every opportunity to place his version and test the case against him. Being denied a hearing before that process even begins, the bench held, is not the kind of prejudice that calls for recalling an otherwise reasoned order.

Bhullar, Chadha and the Section 175(4) argument

The bench then sorted the authorities. One group, from Alexander Rodger v. The Comptoir D'Escompte De Paris as approved in A.R. Antulay v. R.S. Nayak through Grindlays Bank, supports a single proposition: a court of record has inherent power to recall an order passed without hearing a person it affects. The bench did not doubt that for a moment. Another group, from Asit Kumar Kar to Vikram Bakshi v. R.P. Khosla, establishes that Section 362 is no bar to recall of a writ order; the bench accepted that too. None of it was really in dispute. “The power to recall is not in question, its use on these facts is.”

Govind Gopal Lakade and Johra were cited for the rule that a court cannot frame a question and leave it hanging. The bench agreed with the rule but found it did not fit: a notice was in fact issued on 2 February, and the real grievance lay in the delay of service, not in any failure to decide whether notice should go at all.

Much had been said about State of Punjab v. Davinder Pal Singh Bhullar, with the suggestion that the State had relied on it while passing over the parts that helped the Minister. The bench read it as a whole. It concerned an order transferring an investigation to the CBI, a direction with immediate consequences for the State, which was the very party bound by it yet had been kept out of the proceeding. Here the direction went to the DVAC, a party throughout. The Minister was not the addressee of any direction; he was at best a person named in material the ED had forwarded. Bhullar did not require a hearing for every such person before a case can be directed to be registered.

Divine Retreat Centre was cited for the right of an aggrieved person to be heard before an order is passed against him. That judgment, the bench noted, itself considered Union of India v. W.N. Chadha, where the Supreme Court held that a person under investigation, or likely to be investigated, has no right to notice or a hearing before an FIR is registered, since the contrary would defeat the object of investigation. The bench reproduced paragraphs 80 to 90 of Chadha: the rule of audi alteram partem is excluded where its application would itself lead to injustice, and an investigating officer who decides nothing beyond collecting material is under no obligation to hear the accused first. It found Chadha squarely applicable and reinforced by E. Sivakumar v. Union of India, where the Supreme Court held that the accused has no right to be heard at the investigation stage and that a named accused not having been impleaded in the writ petition cannot by itself make the judgment a nullity. Whether the proceeding is under the ordinary criminal law or Article 226 makes no difference; what matters is the nature of the order, not the forum. A direction to register and investigate is a preliminary step that settles nobody's guilt and need not await the version of every person who might eventually be investigated.

Last came XXX v. State of Kerala and Section 175(4) of the BNSS. The bench held it carried the Minister no further. Section 175(4) stipulates the procedure a Magistrate must follow before directing an investigation on a complaint under Section 175(3): calling for a report from the public servant's superior and considering his version. That is a specific safeguard built into a specific statutory procedure, not a general right of pre-decisional hearing attaching to every proceeding that might lead to a police investigation, and it does not apply to a writ court acting on information already forwarded by a statutory agency showing, prima facie, a cognizable offence.

Order

Rev.Aplwp Crl. No. 2 of 2026, the State's review, was dismissed as withdrawn. Rev.Aplwp Crl. No. 3 of 2026, the Minister's review, was dismissed. Cont.P. No. 872 of 2026 was closed, the bench recording that with the State's review withdrawn and the Advocate General's assurance on record that the investigation would be carried forward on the FIR registered, the grievance behind the contempt petition stood met. There was no order as to costs. The connected miscellaneous petitions, W.P.M.P.(Crl) Nos. 579, 653, 335 and 304 of 2026, were closed in the light of the observations made. Mr V. Logesh, Special Public Prosecutor, appeared for the Enforcement Directorate in both reviews.