The police called it a civil dispute, the Magistrate agreed — and then took cognizance anyway

A family quarrel over jamabandi and a sale deed became a forgery prosecution on a complaint filed years after the events. The Patna High Court quashes it as a civil wrong with no element of criminality.

On 21 September 2026 Justice Soni Shrivastava quashed an order of April 2023 by which an Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate at Patna City had taken cognizance against the petitioner for offences under Sections 406, 420, 467, 468 and 471 read with Section 34 of the Indian Penal Code.

The route by which that order came to be passed is the reason the case is worth reporting.

A dispute about land records

The allegation concerned family property. The informant’s case was that a separate jamabandi had been created in the names of two persons through a mutation case, and that the sons of the late owner, together with another man, had deliberately and fraudulently sold vacant residential land measuring 45.4375 decimals to a purchaser by executing a sale deed using those forged documents.

A police case was instituted on that written report in May 2022 for the offences named above.

Eight years of revenue litigation first

The judgment sets out a history that explains why the Court treated the dispute as civil in character rather than merely arguable.

This is a quarrel between close relatives over family property, which had already generated several proceedings under the revenue laws. A mutation case filed by the informant's father in 2013-14 was rejected. A later case was allowed in 2015, and that order was challenged in appeal before the Deputy Collector Land Reforms at Masaurhi by the petitioner's father, whose appeal succeeded. A revision filed by the informant's father was then dismissed.

The petitioner's father died in September 2019. The petitioner, who worked at the Dehradun Ordnance Factory and found the property difficult to manage from there, sold it with his brothers in October 2020.

A title suit was also filed in 2021. And the grievance the criminal case was built on was known to the informant's side in 2014, when they took the civil route by applying to the Circle Officer.

So by the time the police case was instituted in May 2022, the same dispute had been through mutation, appeal, revision and a title suit — with the criminal complaint arriving eight years after the events it complained of.

The final report, and what happened to it

After a thorough investigation the police submitted a final report in August 2022, stating the case to be of a civil nature. A final report of that kind is the investigating agency’s conclusion that no offence is made out.

A Magistrate is not bound by it. He may disagree and take cognizance on the material in the case diary. What happened here was stranger than a disagreement.

Differing with the final report, the Magistrate took cognizance in April 2023, finding a prima facie case. But the impugned order itself, the judgment records, contains the Magistrate’s own finding that the case is of a civil nature — and he nevertheless proceeded, on a reading of certain paragraphs of the case diary, to take cognizance.

An order that records the dispute as civil and then sets a criminal prosecution in motion on the same page is internally at odds with itself, and that is what brought the matter to the High Court.

Three grounds, and a settled test

The Court quashed the order on a combination of grounds it sets out together.

The allegations predominantly give rise to and constitute a civil wrong, with no element of criminality, and do not satisfy the basic ingredients of a criminal offence. The prosecution was attended by inordinate and unexplained delay, pointing to a proceeding apparently brought mala fide. And the proceeding was vexatious.

Those are recognisable as the categories in which the inherent jurisdiction is exercised to stop a prosecution before trial: where the allegations, taken at their highest, do not disclose an offence; where the criminal process is being used as leverage in what is really a civil contest; and where delay and motive together suggest the proceeding is not genuine.

The Court held the petitioner’s case falls squarely within the law laid down by the Supreme Court in Md. Ibrahim — the leading authority on when a dispute about the execution of a sale deed becomes forgery. Its distinction is that executing a document claiming title you do not have is not the making of a false document: a sale deed that says what its executant meant it to say is not forged merely because the seller had no right to sell. The remedy of the person aggrieved lies in a civil suit to set the deed aside.

On that footing the Court said it would proceed without any hesitation to quash the impugned order, and did so.

What was expressly left open

The application was allowed, with a clarification the judgment is careful to record: any observation made in the order is confined to the criminal proceedings and will have no bearing or impact on any civil proceedings or litigation between the parties that remains pending.

That reservation matters to the parties. Nothing decided here says the jamabandi was properly created or the sale deed was good. It says only that those questions belong to the civil court that is already seised of them, and that a criminal prosecution is not the way to answer them.