The argument was that the Magistrate should have examined the CCTV footage first. That is what an investigation is for
He complained to the police repeatedly and got nothing but reference numbers. The Madras High Court upholds the order sending him back to them with a court behind it.
Section 156(3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure lets a Magistrate direct the police to register an FIR and investigate. It exists because the duty under Section 154 to register a case on information disclosing a cognizable offence is not self-executing, and a complainant who is turned away at the station has nowhere else to go.
The order is therefore attacked from the other side more often than almost any other interlocutory direction in criminal procedure, and on 25 September 2026 Justice Shamim Ahmed dealt with four of the standard attacks at once.
The order under challenge
On 1 November 2025 the XVIII Metropolitan Magistrate, Saidapet, Chennai, exercising powers under Section 156(3), directed the jurisdictional police to register an FIR on a complaint by the second respondent and to proceed with investigation in accordance with law.
The proposed accused came in revision. Their grounds were that the dispute is purely civil, arising out of landlord-tenant litigation; that the Magistrate mechanically exercised jurisdiction without application of mind; that the complainant suppressed material facts; that the mandatory requirements of Section 154 were not complied with; and that the complaint was instituted only to frustrate rent control proceedings pending between the parties.
Mr. R. Hari Krishnan appeared for the petitioners, Mr. M.M.I. Khaleel, Government Advocate (Criminal Side), for the police, and Mr. Haja Mohiden Gisthi for the complainant.
A civil dispute is not an answer to a criminal complaint
The Court took the civil-dispute objection first, and answered it on settled Supreme Court authority: the pendency or conclusion of civil proceedings involving the same parties is no justification to quash a criminal case where both arise from the same set of facts. Findings in a civil forum are not determinative of criminal culpability at the stage of quashment.
The passage the judgment relies on contains a warning about what happens when a court goes further — that by embarking on an evaluation of the dispute on merits and quashing an order directing investigation, a High Court effectively stifles the investigation before it begins.
That proposition is not a licence to criminalise contract and property disputes, and the judgment does not read it that way. It answers a narrower point: the existence of a civil remedy, or of pending civil litigation, does not by itself establish that the allegations disclose no offence.
Section 156(3) was the last resort, not the first
The maintainability objection was that the complainant went straight to the Magistrate without exhausting the remedy under Section 154. The record showed the opposite.
He had not rushed to court after the alleged occurrence. He repeatedly approached the jurisdictional police, lodging complaints on several dates, for which complaint reference numbers were generated. He then submitted representations to superior police authorities complaining that the Station House Officer had failed to register an FIR. He continued to pursue his remedies within the police machinery. And despite repeated representations, and despite allegations disclosing cognizable offences, no FIR was registered.
On that conduct, the Court held that invocation of Section 156(3) was not the first remedy but the last — resorted to only after exhausting the statutory mechanism under Section 154 and encountering complete police inaction.
It then made the wider point the facts illustrate. Section 156(3) acts as a judicial safeguard against arbitrary police inaction: where the police refuse to investigate cognizable offences on untenable grounds, the Magistrate is empowered to require them to perform their statutory duty. Far from committing any illegality, the Magistrate had ensured compliance with the statutory scheme of criminal investigation.
The pen drive
A considerable part of the argument concerned CCTV footage on a pen drive — whether it had been produced before the Magistrate — and the point had weighed with the grant of interim protection earlier.
It turned out to be a question of fact that resolved itself. The complainant filed a typed set with his counter affidavit, and from the list of documents annexed to the affidavit supporting the Section 156(3) petition, it was manifest that the CCTV footage had been filed on a pen drive as part and parcel of the petition, along with a certificate under Section 65B of the Indian Evidence Act.
The Court did not stop there, and the reasoning that follows is the most citable part of the judgment. Even assuming the electronic material had not been annexed, it held, it is incomprehensible how such an omission would vitiate proceedings under Section 156(3).
The jurisdiction under that provision is neither evidentiary nor adjudicatory. The Magistrate is not expected to decide whether CCTV footage is genuine, admissible or sufficient to establish guilt. Questions of authenticity, forensic examination, admissibility and evidentiary value of electronic records fall squarely within the domain of investigation and, thereafter, trial. At the pre-investigation stage the Magistrate has only to satisfy himself that the complaint discloses cognizable offences requiring police investigation.
To insist that a Magistrate undertake a detailed evaluation of electronic evidence before directing registration of an FIR would convert a Section 156(3) proceeding into an inquiry under Section 200 or even a full trial, and would defeat the legislative purpose underlying Chapter XII of the Code.
The controversy over the pen drive was therefore wholly misplaced and legally inconsequential, and had been disproportionately magnified to divert attention from the core issue — whether the complaint discloses cognizable offences.
Investigation before adjudication
The last strand deals with the role of a revisional court, and states a principle worth keeping.
A revisional court is not expected to substitute investigation with judicial speculation. Criminal law proceeds on the foundational principle that facts must first be investigated before they are adjudicated. Accepting the petitioners’ submissions would produce the anomaly that investigation becomes unnecessary because the proposed accused dispute the allegations — which is true of every case in which an FIR is ever registered.
The order
The Court held that the impugned order suffered from neither perversity nor jurisdictional error warranting interference under Sections 397 and 401 CrPC. The criminal revision case was dismissed, the Magistrate’s order of 1 November 2025 was affirmed, and the Inspector of Police, E-2 Royapettah Police Station was directed to register an FIR on the complaint of 22 November 2024 and proceed with the investigation strictly in accordance with law. No order as to costs.
Nothing in the judgment decides that an offence was committed — that is precisely the question it says must be investigated first. What it decides is where the threshold sits. A Magistrate faced with a complaint that discloses cognizable offences, after the police have declined to register one despite repeated approaches, is not obliged to assess the evidence, resolve the parties’ competing accounts, or form a view about whether the real quarrel is a tenancy. Those inquiries belong later, and to somebody else.