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Complaint can be filed if cops don’t lodge FIR: HC
The order was recently passed by a division bench of justices Vivek Chaudhary and Narendra Kumar Johari on a petition filed by a petitioner of Sitapur district.
The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court has ruled that a person may file a complaint [with the concerned magistrate] under certain sections of the criminal procedure code (CrPC) if police officials refuse to lodge an FIR even after he/she files an application.
The court said that the complainant has an appropriate remedy of filing a complaint under section 156(3) (which giving magistrate the power to order a preliminary inquiry before registering an FIR) or section 200 (which outlines the procedure for a magistrate to take cognisance of an offence) of the CrPC.
The order was recently passed by a division bench of justices Vivek Chaudhary and Narendra Kumar Johari on a petition filed by one Arvind Kumar Singh, a resident of Sitapur district. The petitioner requested the court to issue directives to respondent police officials to lodge an FIR on his application. He submitted to the court that despite moving an application on September 24, no FIR was lodged on his application submitted to the station house officer of Hariyawan.
Referring to a case in 2014, his counsel submitted the Supreme Court had observed that a police officer could not avoid his duty for registering a case of offence if in the application cognisable offence was disclosed and, in the case he avoided such a responsibility, action might be taken against the erring officer under section 161-A of CrPC...
Meanwhile, the state counsel pointed out that the judgment rendered by the division bench of this court in the case of ‘Waseem Haider Vs. State of U.P. and others’, reported in 2021, to state that after considering the law laid down by the SC in Lalita Kumari’s case in 2014, whereby this court expressed its opinion that the informant has statutory remedy under section 156(3) or under section 200 of CrPC of filing a complaint.
After hearing the matter, the court observed: “This Court is of the opinion that if the petitioner is aggrieved by non-lodging of the FIR, he has appropriate remedy of filing a complaint under Section 156(3) CrPC. or under Section 200 of the CrPC”. The court then disposed of the plea.
