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Rikhab Birani v. State of Uttar Pradesh

Criminal Appeal · 2025 INSC 512Decided 16 Apr 2025
Criminal Appeal (arising out of SLP (Crl.) No. 8592 of 2024)
Chief Justice · Justice Sanjay Kumar

Background

The appellants had orally agreed to sell a property in Kanpur to the second respondent for about Rs. 1.35 crore; when she failed to pay the agreed advance (a cheque she gave even bounced), they sold the property to someone else at a lower price about a year later. The buyer then tried, twice, to get a criminal case registered over the failed deal, and both times the Magistrate rejected it as a purely civil dispute. She then went directly to the police, who registered an FIR and eventually filed a chargesheet for cheating, criminal breach of trust and related offences; the Magistrate took cognizance and summoned the sellers, and the High Court refused to quash the proceedings.

Decision Breakdown

The Supreme Court quashed the FIR and all resulting proceedings, holding that the essential ingredient of cheating, a dishonest or fraudulent intention existing at the very moment the contract was made, was never shown; the chargesheet merely repeated the FIR's allegations without any material establishing that ingredient. The Court noted this was part of a recurring pattern of civil money disputes from Uttar Pradesh being wrongly converted into criminal cases, and it imposed Rs. 50,000 in costs on the State of Uttar Pradesh for the police and courts repeatedly failing to apply settled law distinguishing civil wrongs from criminal offences.

Lesson Learnt

A failed business deal or unpaid debt is a civil dispute, not automatically a crime: a cheating charge requires proof that the other side never intended to honour the deal right from the start, and courts and police who ignore this distinction can be penalised for misusing criminal process to pressure a civil debtor.

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

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