A Division Bench had already refused: Supreme Court restores a charge a Single Judge then quashed
Losing before a Division Bench on the same submissions did not stop a second petition, and the Court holds the missing original document is a matter for trial, not a ground to end the case.
In October 2023 a Division Bench of the High Court of Bombay at Goa declined to interfere with an order framing a charge of forgery. That order was never challenged, and it attained finality. In 2024 the accused filed a fresh petition in the same High Court, raising the same contention, and a Single Judge quashed the charge. On 22 September 2026, in Antonetto J. D’Souza v. Aldila Braganza and Others, a Bench of Justice Ujjal Bhuyan and Justice Atul S. Chandurkar set that order aside and restored the prosecution.
Two propositions come out of the judgment. The absence of the original of a document alleged to be forged does not, by itself, justify quashing the entire prosecution — the prosecution is entitled to attempt to prove its case, including by circumstantial evidence, at trial. And a court exercising jurisdiction over an order framing charge cannot re-appreciate the whole of the material when a coordinate Bench of the same court has already considered the same submissions and declined to interfere.
A building plan, and a neighbour’s complaint
The informant and the accused are neighbours. The accused, together with her father-in-law, had undertaken construction pursuant to Licence No. 20/72 dated 13 April 1971 issued by the Mapusa Municipal Council. The informant’s case was that the structure they erected was illegal, and that the building plan they relied upon had been interpolated — a forged copy of the original approved plan drawn by an architect, Mr Agnelo Mascarenhas.
On that footing the informant complained to the Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority. His complaint of 5 July 2012 led to the registration of First Information Report No. 152 of 2012 for offences punishable under Sections 468, 471 and 420 read with Section 34 of the Indian Penal Code.
The accused and her father-in-law sought anticipatory bail. In its reply of 14 March 2013 the police opposed the application, the Sub-Inspector submitting that custodial interrogation was necessary to recover both the original plan and the forged plan. The Sessions Court nevertheless granted anticipatory bail on 19 June 2013, subject to conditions. Neither plan, in the event, was ever recovered — a fact that would become the centre of everything that followed.
The offences alleged frame what the prosecution has to establish. Section 468 punishes forgery for the purpose of cheating; Section 471 punishes using as genuine a document known or believed to be forged; and Section 420 punishes cheating and dishonestly inducing delivery of property. Read with Section 34, the case put was that the accused and her father-in-law acted in furtherance of a common intention. On that framing, the document said to have been used as genuine — the interpolated plan placed before the authority — is the centre of the charge, which is why its whereabouts became the whole of the defence.
Fourteen years of challenges
The final report was filed on 2 April 2016, alleging that the accused and her father-in-law, in furtherance of their common intention, had forged a copy of the original plan and submitted it as genuine to the Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority.
Before the charge was framed the accused were heard by the Judicial Magistrate First Class. Their argument then was the one they would make for the next decade: that without recovery of the original plan and the forged plan the chargesheet was not maintainable at all. On 21 December 2017 the Magistrate rejected it. Considering the ingredients of the sections and the documents filed with the chargesheet, the Magistrate held that the witness statements and the material prima facie showed that a second plan had been forged by superimposing alterations on a copy of the approved plan, to justify the illegal construction, and had been used as genuine before the Village Panchayat at Calangute.
The accused took that order in revision under Section 397 CrPC. The Additional Sessions Judge, Mapusa, dismissed the revision on 28 December 2021 and confirmed the direction to frame charges.
While the revision was pending, the accused had also moved the High Court by Criminal Writ Petition No. 458 of 2020, later renumbered 80 of 2023, challenging both the FIR and the chargesheet. Her father-in-law died during its pendency and the petition was amended to bring subsequent events on record. On 31 October 2023 a Division Bench refused to interfere. Its reasoning was recorded at length: two authorities dealing with the matter had found prima facie material to frame charges, and it would be improper for the High Court under Section 482 to upset those orders on the allegations in the petition. The material collected by the investigating agency was already produced with the chargesheet; both the trial court and the revisional court had found it sufficient for framing charges; and the contention that the FIR was false and that there were no documents to prove the charge could not be looked into in those proceedings.
The Division Bench’s order, which the Supreme Court reproduced, dealt with each strand of the accused’s case. It recorded that the petition had been filed in 2020, that the discharge application had been rejected by the trial court in 2017, and that an appeal against that rejection had also failed. It noted her contention that the allegedly forged document was in the possession of neither the investigating agency, nor the Goa Coastal Zone Management Authority, nor the Panchayat, and that there could therefore be no charge of forgery.
Against that it set the fact of the Magistrate’s order of 21 December 2017 finding a prima facie case, and the Additional Sessions Judge’s dismissal of the revision on 28 December 2021 confirming it. Where two authorities dealing with the matter had found prima facie material to frame charges, the Division Bench held, it would be improper for the High Court under Section 482 to upset those orders on the allegations made in the petition. It added that once a court comes to such a prima facie conclusion, the accused has a right to challenge it by revision or other proceedings in accordance with law — a right this accused had exercised, and on which she had lost.
That order was not challenged any further. It attained finality.
In 2024 the accused filed Criminal Writ Petition No. 346 of 2024, again challenging the Magistrate’s order framing charge and the Sessions Court’s order rejecting the revision, and again urging that the original plan had not been placed on record, so that photocopies alone could not prove forgery. This time the contention found favour. By a judgment dated 28 August 2024 a Single Judge of the same High Court held that the ingredients of the offence could not be established and quashed the charge.
The informant’s appeal
Appearing for the informant, Ms Vrinda Grover submitted that the High Court had exceeded its jurisdiction under Section 482 in interfering with an order framing charge that the Sessions Court had upheld. At the stage of framing charge the Magistrate was not required to make a roving inquiry into the material or to examine the genuineness of the documents filed by the prosecuting agency. Whether the plan submitted by the accused was forged was a matter for trial, and that inquiry was not permissible at a preliminary stage.
The accused appeared in person and supported the order under challenge. Her position was that since the original plan had never been placed on record with the chargesheet, the High Court’s view was correct. She took the Court through material including the prosecution’s own statements that the original had not been recovered, and argued that without it a charge of forgery could never have been framed.
What a court may and may not do before trial
The Bench set out the limits of the jurisdiction the Single Judge had exercised, drawing on two recent decisions.
In K.H. Kamaladini v. State, the Court had summarised the scope of a hearing on framing of charge in five propositions. The court may examine only the documents forming part of the chargesheet and no other material. It must then decide whether sufficient ground exists for proceeding with the trial. It cannot sift the evidence in the chargesheet with a view to separating the grain from the chaff. If the evidence, without cross-examination or rebuttal, shows that the accused has committed no offence, an order of discharge must follow. And if the material creates grave suspicion against the accused, the court will not discharge.
In Ram Prakash Chadha v. State of Uttar Pradesh, the Court had held that the question of framing a charge arises where the court satisfies itself about a prima facie case emerging from the record of the case and the documents submitted with it, and that the conclusion cannot rest on suppositions, suspicions or conjectures unfounded in the material available.
Measured against that, the Single Judge had done what the stage does not permit: a detailed analysis and a re-appreciation of the entire material, sifting the chargesheet to ask whether the evidence could result in conviction. The correct question was narrower — whether grave suspicion was raised on that material, sufficient to sustain a trial.
The missing original
On the substantive point, the Court’s answer is short and has consequences well beyond this case.
The absence of the original document relied on by the prosecution to bring home a charge of forgery is a matter to be considered at the trial. Its absence cannot by itself be made the basis for quashing the entire prosecution. The prosecution may attempt to prove the charge on circumstantial evidence, and the proceedings are not liable to be quashed without giving it the opportunity to make that attempt.
That is the difference between a case that is weak and a case that cannot be tried. A prosecution which must prove forgery without producing the forged instrument may well fail, and the accused retains every defence she has. What she does not have is the right to have that outcome declared in advance, on a petition, before any evidence is led.
The second bite
The judgment’s sharpest criticism is directed not at the reasoning below but at the procedural posture that allowed it.
The Bench was satisfied that the Single Judge was not justified in exercising jurisdiction and re-appreciating the entire material despite the fact that, in an earlier round of the same litigation at the instance of the same accused, a Division Bench had considered the very same submissions and declined to interfere with the order framing charge. The accused had sought, again, to challenge that order despite having been unsuccessful earlier.
The practical point for litigants is unmistakable. An unchallenged refusal by a Division Bench on a given ground is not a preliminary skirmish to be re-fought before a Single Judge of the same court in a fresh petition. Where it has attained finality, it closes that ground.
It is also a point about who carries the burden of that repetition. The appellant here was the informant — a private complainant, not the State — who had to come to the Supreme Court to restore a charge that two courts had already directed and a third had already declined to disturb. A complainant with fewer resources would simply have lost the case at the second writ petition, without any court ever hearing evidence on whether the plan was forged.
What the case leaves behind
Stripped of its procedural layers, this is a neighbour dispute over a building in Goa that has outlived one of its parties and is now returning to a Magistrate to begin. The complaint was made in July 2012. The chargesheet came in April 2016. Charge was directed in December 2017. Fourteen years after the complaint, no evidence has been recorded.
Almost all of that time was consumed by challenges to the order framing charge — a discharge application, an appeal against its rejection, a revision, a writ petition, a second writ petition, and now an appeal to the Supreme Court. Each was a proceeding the accused was entitled to bring, and the judgment does not suggest otherwise. What it does say is that the entitlement runs out when a court of coordinate strength has already ruled on the same ground and that ruling has become final.
The direction to expedite is the Court’s acknowledgment of the cost. It is also a reminder of what an order framing charge is: not a finding that the accused is guilty of forging a building plan, but a finding that there is enough on the chargesheet to require the question to be answered on evidence. Whether the prosecution can prove a forgery without producing the forged plan is now, at last, a question for the trial.
Order
The judgment dated 28 August 2024 passed by the Single Judge in Criminal Writ Petition No. 346 of 2024 was set aside and the proceedings in Criminal Case No. 90/S/2016/F before the Magistrate were restored. The Court clarified that all contentions remain open to be raised at the trial and that its observations will not prejudice either party. Since the complaint dates from 2012, the proceedings before the Magistrate were directed to be expedited. The criminal appeal was allowed in those terms and the pending interlocutory applications disposed of.