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Kailash Vijayvargiya vs Rajlakshmi Chaudhuri and others

Criminal Appeal · 2023 INSC 494Decided 4 May 2023
Criminal Appeal No. 1581 of 2021
M.R. Shah · Sanjiv Khanna · C.T. Ravikumar instead of Justice Sanjiv Khanna

Background

The complainant, a BJP state committee member in West Bengal, alleged she was raped by three senior party leaders, including Kailash Vijayvargiya, at Vijayvargiya's residence in November 2018, allegedly as pressure over an unrelated rape case she had filed against a party colleague. She approached the police multiple times over the following two years but no FIR was registered, so in late 2020 she moved the Chief Judicial Magistrate (CJM), Alipore, under Section 156(3) CrPC asking the court to direct police investigation. The CJM dismissed her application after examining the merits and the two-year delay, but the Calcutta High Court set that order aside, holding, relying on the Constitution Bench ruling in Lalita Kumari, that a Magistrate cannot assess the truth of allegations at this preliminary stage, and sent the matter back to the Magistrate. The accused then appealed to the Supreme Court.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court declined to interfere with the High Court's core direction: that the CJM had wrongly evaluated the merits and the delay instead of simply deciding, as a preliminary matter, whether to order an FIR, examine the complainant under Section 202, or direct a preliminary police inquiry as permitted by Lalita Kumari. The Court expressly refused to comment on whether the rape allegations were true, noting there were contested facts on both sides, including the State's claim that no record existed of any complaint by the woman near the time of the alleged incident, and the accused's claim (obtained via RTI) that police preliminary inquiries found no such allegation was made until much later. Since, on remand, the Magistrate had directly ordered registration of the FIR (misreading the High Court's order as requiring that outcome) rather than exercising independent judicial discretion, the Supreme Court set aside that follow-on order and sent the matter back once more for the Magistrate to properly apply his mind to the available options under the law.

Lesson Learnt

When a court sends a case back to a Magistrate to reconsider whether to order an FIR under Section 156(3) CrPC, that reconsideration must involve genuine judicial discretion (weighing whether to direct registration, examine the complainant personally, or order a preliminary inquiry) and cannot simply be treated as an automatic instruction to register the FIR; and at this preliminary stage, courts deliberately avoid ruling on whether the underlying allegations are true.

Official source (sci.gov.in)View Judgment (PDF)

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