The Madras High Court has referred to a larger Bench the issue of deciding how the police and the trial courts should deal with complaints and counter complaints in which the aggressor and the victim end up playing role reversal by presenting two different narrations about the same incident.
Justice N. Anand Venkatesh took the decision after finding that the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, a central law which traces its source to Entry III of the concurrent list in the seventh schedule to the Constitution, does not lay down any definite procedure for the investigation of a case and a case in counter.
Further, different Division Benches of the High Court had taken diametrically opposite views on the issue with some Benches fixing the responsibility of finding the real aggressor on the trial courts and the others fixing it on the investigating officer concerned in accordance with the Police Standing Orders (PSO).
Though there were rulings to the effect that administrative instructions such as the PSO would have no force of law, there were also contrary decisions which stated that the lacunae in the law could be filled up though administrative instructions such as the PSO without brushing them aside.
In order to solve the conundrum, the judge directed the High Court Registry to place the matter before Chief Justice Sanjay V. Gangapurwala for constituting a larger bench of appropriate strength to deliver a decisive verdict on dealing with a case and a case in counter regarding a same incident.
The orders were passed on a batch of petitions filed for quashing of charge sheets in criminal cases. In each of those cases, the judge found the police to have registered two First Information Reports (FIRs) on the basis of complaint and a counter complaint and filed two charge sheets before the court concerned.
Wondering how such a practice could be allowed, the judge sought the assistance of the Bar in deciding the issue and accordingly advocates V.C. Janarthanan, M. Mohamed Riyaz, K. Thiruvengadam, R. Harikrishnan, C. Iyapparaj and C. Arun Kumar made their submissions before the court.
It was brought to the notice of the court that Rule 588A (new Rule 566) of the Police Standing Orders require the investigating officer concerned to find the real aggressor by conducting a thorough investigation on both the complaint as well as the counter complaint regarding the same incident.
Though some Division Benches of the High Court had relied upon the PSO to hold that the burden to find the real aggressor could not be shifted on trial courts, another set of benches had ruled that trial courts must conduct trial in both the case and counter case together in order to find the real culprit.
“In the face of the aforesaid conflict, the only course available to me is to refer the case to a larger bench. Considering the fact that there is a complete lack of uniformity on this very important issue concerning the investigative machinery of the State, there is an urgent need for an authoritative pronouncement of this issue by a larger bench of this court as cases of this genre crop up on a daily basis,” the judge wrote.
