सुप्रीम कोर्ट की दो ध्वनियों से उभरा नीरज मामला: पूर्वनिर्णय और गिरफ्तारियों की वैधता पर संघर्ष

An analysis of Neeraj v. State of U.P. and the conflicting Supreme Court precedents on the legality of arrest, examining when an unconstitutional arrest may be challenged, the scope of habeas corpus after cognizance, and the uncertainty surrounding Article 22(1).

In 1940, Liverpool police stopped a man named Leachinsky and told him he was being arrested for “unlawful possession” of goods, invoking a local bylaw. The bylaw, as it turned out, gave them no such power. What the police actually suspected him of was receiving stolen goods, a charge for which they did have grounds to arrest him. They just never said so. Leachinsky was later acquitted and sued for false imprisonment, and the case reached the House of Lords, where the police argued that the arrest should stand anyway: they had a valid reason all along, even if it was not the one they gave.

The House of Lords disagreed. In a verdict that would go on to define the law of arrest for the rest of the common law world, Lord Simonds held that a person is entitled to know why he is being deprived of his liberty, not so the police can tick a box, but so he can decide, then and there, whether to submit, to argue, or to explain himself. An arrest without disclosure of its actual grounds is not a lesser version of a lawful arrest. It is not an arrest at all. It makes no difference that better reasons existed in the officer’s head if they were never spoken aloud. Christie v. Leachinsky1 would later be written into Section 28, Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 1984, but the case remains the reason the rule exists stating that liberty cannot be taken first and justified later. Nearly eighty years later, an Allahabad High Court Bench confronted a similar question in Neeraj v. State of U.P.2

Article 141 of the Constitution holds that the laws laid down by the Supreme Court is binding on all courts within the territory of India. It is an unglamorous provision, the kind that rarely makes headlines. It is this note that Allahabad High Court unsettled in the Neeraj case, decided on 27 May 2026. One reflection on this subject asks what happens when the Supreme Court speaks in two voices; with its own Benches pulling in opposite directions on the same issue. Neeraj, in isolation, poses a sharper and more uncomfortable question: what happens when a High Court decides, for itself, which of those two voices requires to be followed?

Beginning with Pankaj Bansal v. Union of India3, and carried forward through Prabir Purkayastha v. State (NCT of Delhi)4, Vihaan Kumar v. State of Haryana5 and Mihir Rajesh Shah v. State of Maharashtra6, the Supreme Court held that a person cannot be deprived of his liberty without being informed, in writing, and in a language he understands, about the grounds of arrest; and that a failure to do so is not a lapse that a later charge-sheet can silently repair. As Vihaan Kumar put it, the filing of a charge-sheet will not validate a breach of the constitutional mandate under Article 22(1). An arrest that is unconstitutional at its inception, stays invalid.

The second, relatively older body of authorities comprising, Kanu Sanyal v. DM, Darjeeling7, A.K. Gopalan v. State of Madras8, Sanjay Dutt v. State9 and the Allahabad High Court Full Bench in Bal Mukund Jaiswal v. District Jail, Varanasi10, which holds that in a habeas corpus writ the court examines the legality of the detention as it stands on the date of hearing, not the defects that may have attended the original arrest. Once a Magistrate takes cognizance and the accused is remanded afresh, the custody flows from those judicial orders and not from the arrest that preceded them.

Faced with the two lines, the High Court might have followed the later and more considered decisions of the Supreme Court. It might have distinguished the recent cases on their facts. It might have referred the question upward. Instead, it did something else.

The Division Bench of Allahabad High Court held that the recent decisions, Pankaj Bansal, Prabir Purkayastha, Vihaan Kumar, Mihir Rajesh Shah, and Kasireddy Upender Reddy v. State of A.P.11, are per incuriam, hit by the principle of stare decisis, and therefore not binding precedents. Five judgments of the Supreme Court, were set aside as non-binding by the High Court.

The judgment in the Neeraj case, nowhere say that the constitutional duties of State simply disappear at cognizance. It holds only that the methodology must change; that the accused who complains of an illegal arrest after cognizance must raise his grievance under Articles 21 and 22 in a bail application rather than through a writ of habeas corpus. That narrower proposition about remedies is arguable, and maybe acceptable. But it is not what makes Neeraj remarkable. What makes it remarkable is the route the Bench travelled to reach it.

The instability in this area runs along two different fault lines. One concerns timing, whether an illegal arrest may be challenged at any stage of the trial or only until cognizance is taken, and that is the question Neeraj engages. The other concerns content, whether the grounds of arrest must be furnished in writing at all, and it is that second question which the Supreme Court has recently signalled it may refer to a larger Bench in the Sonam Raghuvanshi proceedings. Both feed a common sense that the law is unsettled, but they are not the same conflict, and a reference on one will not automatically resolve the other.

The timing question arises because recent decisions did not fix any outer limit for challenging an illegal arrest. If the defect at the moment of arrest is incurable, as Vihaan Kumar and Mihir Rajesh Shah suggest, then in principle it may be raised at any point: Before cognizance, after charges are framed, even while evidence is being recorded at trial. It was against this open-ended possibility that Neeraj sought to draw a line.

The Court was faced with two bodies of authority. The older line, running through Kanu Sanyal, A.K. Gopalan, Sanjay Dutt, and the Allahabad Full Bench in Bal Mukund Jaiswal, holds that in a habeas corpus petition, the court examines the legality of the detention as it stands on the date of hearing, and not the defects that may have attended the original arrest. The recent line treats the initial illegality as incurable at every stage. Reconciling the two, the Bench held that the validity of an arrest may be tested by way of habeas corpus only until cognizance is taken on the charge-sheet. Once cognizance is taken, the initial remand loses its efficacy, and custody rests instead on the judicial orders that follow. Thereafter, the Bench was careful to note, the accused is not left without remedy; he may still raise the violation of Articles 21 and 22, but through a bail application rather than a writ of habeas corpus.

Habeas corpus tests the lawfulness of present detention, and once a person is held under a fresh judicial order of committal or remand, the writ looks to that order rather than to the arrest behind it. The Bench also took the view that the recent decisions had not considered the older line on the maintainability of habeas corpus, and so did not govern that particular question. Whether that reading is correct is itself a matter that a larger Bench, or the Supreme Court, may ultimately have to settle.

That the question is genuinely open, and not closed by Neeraj, is evident from the fact that coordinate Benches of the same High Court had shortly before taken the opposite view. In Manjeet Singh v. State of U.P.12, and Raj Kumar v. State of U.P.13, the Allahabad High Court set aside arrests and remand orders for non-communication of the grounds of arrest, even after the charge-sheet had been filed and trial had begun. On its own facts the petition in the case of Neeraj was in any case a weak one, having approached the court more than two years after his arrest, without disclosing the date of his arrest or remand, and without challenging the remand orders, so that it could have been declined on the ground of delay alone. But the larger question it raises, how long the window to challenge an unconstitutional arrest should remain open, is one that only a larger Bench or the Supreme Court can finally answer.

The second question is of a different order, and it goes to the content of the right rather than the stage of enforcing it. The Pankaj Bansal case held, in the context of the Prevention of Money-Laundering Act, 2002, that the grounds of arrest must be supplied in writing. The Mihir Rajesh Shah case carried this further, holding that the requirement of written grounds is mandatory across all statutes, including offences under the ordinary penal law, and that the grounds must be communicated in a language the arrestee understands. Read together, these decisions appear to make writing indispensable.

Vihaan Kumar, however, has been read as leaving room for oral communication where writing is not immediately possible, provided the grounds are in fact conveyed. It was this divergence that the Supreme Court confronted in the State of Meghalaya v. Sonam Raghuvanshi14 matter, where a Bench of Justices Manoj Misra and Shree Chandrashekhar, hearing the State of Meghalaya’s challenge to the bail granted to the accused, observed that its own decisions on the point were in conflict and indicated that the question might have to be referred to a larger Bench. The same proceedings raised a related issue of whether a mere typographical error in the arrest warrant, is enough to vitiate an arrest. Until a larger Bench addresses that whether it demands writing in every case, and how far a defect in form goes to the legality of the arrest, remains unsettled.

Both questions flow from Article 22(1) that no person shall be arrested without being informed of the grounds; and both reflect the difficulty of translating a principle, once declared, into a workable rule that police, Magistrates, and trial courts can conform to. One asks in what form the right must be carried out; the other asks for how long it survives. A single arrest may raise both questions at once: whether the grounds were given in writing, and whether the objection has come too late.

For now, an arrest challenged before cognizance stands on firmer ground than one challenged after; an objection framed around the absence of written grounds may fare differently depending on which line of authority a court follows. The prudent course, until the position is clarified, is to raise the objection early, to challenge the remand orders and not merely the arrest, and to press the constitutional violation at the first opportunity rather than the last.

This piece is the first of two, and it has kept to a single fault line, the one about timing: the stage until which an unconstitutional arrest may still be challenged, which is the question Neeraj engages and, by holding five decisions of the Supreme Court to be per incuriam, so sharply unsettles. The other fault line goes to content, whether the grounds of arrest must be furnished in writing at all, and it has not stood still since. The Sonam Raghuvanshi proceedings, in which a Bench had observed that the court’s own decisions were in conflict, have since been decided. What that decision holds, and what it leaves standing of Pankaj Bansal, Mihir Rajesh Shah, and Vihaan Kumar, is the subject of the second part.

What is certain is that neither question can rest where it presently lies. The transformation that began with Pankaj Bansal gave the arrestee a right of real substance. What remains is to settle its shape: the form the right must take, and the stage until which it may be enforced.

*Advocate at Supreme Court of India and LLM Candidate at University of Edinburgh. Author can be reached at: kartikeya0204@gmail.com.

**3rd year student, BA LLB (Hons.), Rajiv Gandhi National University of Law (RGNUL), Punjab. Author can be reached at: aadeshkumarsingh24114@rgnul.ac.in.

1. 1947 AC 573 : 1947 UKHL 2.

3. (2024) 7 SCC 576 : (2024) 3 SCC (Cri) 450.

4. (2024) 8 SCC 254 : (2024) 3 SCC (Cri) 573.

5. (2025) 5 SCC 799 : (2025) 2 SCC (Cri) 762.

6. (2026) 1 SCC 500 : (2026) 1 SCC (Cri) 1.

7. (1973) 2 SCC 674 : 1973 SCC (Cri) 980.

9. (1994) 5 SCC 410 : 1994 SCC (Cri) 1433.

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