“Civil in nature” is not a reason to refuse an FIR — a magistrate who held a mini trial exceeded his jurisdiction
Justice Shamim Ahmed sets aside an order of the Judicial Magistrate II, Chengalpattu and remands the matter with a direction to order registration of an FIR and a proper investigation, to be completed within eight weeks.
The revision petitioner says he bought about three acres near Thiruporur in 2005 under two registered sale deeds, and had the revenue records mutated in his name. When he went to the police with a complaint about those properties, no FIR followed; when he asked a magistrate to direct one, the magistrate declined on the ground that the dispute was civil in nature. On 9 October 2026 the Madras High Court set that order aside, holding that the magistrate had conducted a mini trial and exceeded his jurisdiction in doing so.
What he bought, and when
The petitioner's case is set out in some detail. By a registered sale deed of 19 October 2005 he purchased four parcels in Survey Nos. 462/4A1, 462/4A2, 463/1B and 463/5A, measuring thirty-one, thirty, fifty-three and eighty-three cents respectively — in all about 1.97 acres — from their owner, on the file of the Sub-Registrar at Thiruporur. By a second registered sale deed of 11 July 2005 he purchased parcels in Survey Nos. 463/1A and 463/8, of thirty-seven and sixty-four cents, about 1.01 acres, from another owner. All the revenue records were duly mutated in his name.
His petition before the Judicial Magistrate II, Chengalpattu was dismissed by order of 27 November 2025. Two private respondents were impleaded in the revision by an order of this Court in July 2026.
The test the magistrate should have applied
The judgment does not leave the correct approach to inference; it states it. “The true test is not whether civil proceedings exist, but whether the ingredients of penal offences are prima facie made out.”
If the allegations disclose forgery, fabrication of documents, cheating, criminal conspiracy or any other cognizable offence, “the investigating agency is under a statutory obligation to investigate irrespective of the pendency of civil litigation”. And the two kinds of liability are not alternatives: “Civil liability and criminal liability operate in distinct fields. The existence of one does not necessarily exclude the other.”
Applied to this complaint, the Court found on a plain reading that the averments against the two private respondents disclosed cognizable offences — forgery, fabrication of documents, cheating and criminal conspiracy. Registration of an FIR and a proper investigation were therefore mandatory, and the fact that the dispute also concerns civil rights could not be a ground to deny them.
The line between a threshold view and a trial
The holding is short and the phrase in it is the one to remember. The magistrate “erred in exceeding its jurisdiction, by conducting a mini trial and refusing to direct the concerned Police to register an FIR and for conducting proper investigation, on the ground that the dispute is civil in nature”.
The distinction matters because the civil-or-criminal question is a real one and is asked constantly. Where it is asked is what the judgment settles: not by a magistrate weighing competing accounts of a property transaction before any investigation has happened, but after the facts have been gathered. A complaint that discloses a cognizable offence does not stop doing so because the parties also have a civil dispute; and whether it discloses one is not to be decided by a preliminary assessment of who is likely to be right about the land.
The point sits neatly against the other half of the same problem. Only weeks ago the Supreme Court quashed a fourteen-year-old Gujarat prosecution over unpaid steel bills as “pre-eminently” civil, holding that a complainant wanting his money should have filed a suit. Both propositions are orthodox and they are not in tension: a criminal process may be stopped once it is clear the grievance is in substance a civil claim, but a magistrate cannot reach that conclusion at the door, on affidavits, in place of an investigation.
Order
The criminal revision case was allowed and the order of 27 November 2025 set aside. The case was remanded to the Judicial Magistrate II, Chengalpattu with a direction to pass an appropriate order directing the Inspector of Police, District Crime Branch, Chengalpattu District to register an FIR, investigate the matter properly and submit a report in accordance with law.
The exercise is to be completed within eight weeks of receipt of a certified copy of the order, and the Registry was directed to send a copy to the magistrate forthwith for compliance. There was no order as to costs.
Copies were also directed to the Superintendent of Police and the Inspector of Police of the District Crime Branch at Chengalpattu, and to the Public Prosecutor. The practical effect is that a complaint about documents relating to land bought in 2005 will be investigated for the first time, nearly a year after the magistrate declined to order it.