Respondent Side Speaking
Respondent Side Speaking
The unfolding of the series of events started on 13th January 2024, when a
complaint of cheating under Section 420 of the IPC 1860, was filed against
Mr. Pankaj Shah, a garment shop owner. He was then called at Badar
Police Station the very next day. Mr. Pankaj thought it would be a good idea
to take along with him a lawyer, so he invited his friend Adv. Piyush Patel.
Even when Adv. Patel informed Mr. Pankaj that he was not well versed in
criminal law, he was still persuaded to accompany him. When they reached
Badar Police Station, API Ganesh Shatham began informing Mr. Pankaj
about the complaint that had been filed against him. However, Adv. Patel
thought that his friend was being threatened, to which he reacted in a
hostile way, which interrupted the police procedure. API Shatham tried to
keep calm and asked Adv. Patel to get out of the police station. However,
this instruction was blatantly ignored by Adv. Patel, which led to further
heating up of the moment. Eventually, an argument broke out between the
two and in an attempt to calm the situation down, API Shatham was forced
to use physical force against Adv. Patel. Hearing this commotion, 2
advocates standing near the police station misinterpreted the situation and
rushed to the Badar JMFC Court Bar Association and informed other
advocates about this incident. Till that time, Adv. Patel was arrested and
detained in police custody, as the police filed a case against him, under
section 186 and 189 of IPC 1860. The learned magistrate took suo-moto
cognizance of the case and granted bail to Adv. Patel. This incident led a
senior advocate of the Hon’ble Supreme Court of Indiana to move to the
Supreme Court and seek appropriate measures for protecting advocates.
Issue 1 -
Is the Case maintainable in the Hon’ble SC of Indiana?
Argument - We would like to humbly submit to the court that this case is not
maintainable in the Supreme Court for 2 major reasons, the 1st being
related to Article 32 of the Constitution. The Article states that individuals
are empowered to approach the Supreme Court if their fundamental rights
are violated. However, we have observed no violation of any fundamental
right in this incident. Moreover, everything done by API Shatham along with
other involved police personnel was strictly professional and had proper
justification. The second point, your honor would be that this petition is
simply a waste of Hon’ble Courts time and resources as we find it frivolous
and baseless. Frivolous PILs and petitions have become a serious issue in
recent times. The Chief Justice DY Chandrachud rightly said on October
2023 while dismissing a similar frivolous petition, that “there is a limit to
frivolity in the Supreme Court and the petitioner wasted the time of the
court, as judges burn the midnight oil to go through the petitions.” There
have been multiple instances in the judicial history, where petitions and
PILs were rejected and dismissed along with penalizing the petitioner for
wasting the court’s time.
In the case of Ashwini Kumar Upadhyay v. Union of India and Anr. of 2020,
where Chief Justice Chandrachud clarified that “the court is not there to
please anyone or engage in political discussions, emphasizing that it is not
a political forum”
In another case that is Nirmal Nahata v. State (Urban Development)
And Others of 2013, the Supreme Court said that “We think time has come
when genuine and bona fide public interest litigation must be encouraged
whereas frivolous public interest litigation should be discouraged.” The
Hon’ble court even mentioned that it must take effective steps to prevent its
abuse on the basis of monetary and non-monetary directions.
Therefore, as this case does not fulfill any criteria for being in the
jurisdiction of the Hon’ble Supreme Court, we request it to be immediately
dismissed.