The Punjab and Haryana High Court has extended its interim protection to Rajya Sabha MP Sandeep Pathak for a second successive week, blocking Punjab from taking any coercive action against him without the court's prior permission. The extension came after Punjab's counsel again failed - on a question the court had specifically posed on May 8 - to confirm whether any cognizable offence had been registered against the sitting Member of Parliament. Chief Justice Sheel Nagu's Bench made plain its frustration with the State's repeated evasion, yet the court had no answer to place on record.
A Direct Question the State Will Not Answer
The central difficulty in this case is strikingly simple: the court wants to know whether an FIR exists. Punjab has twice declined to say. Senior advocate Randeep Rai, appearing for Pathak, put it plainly when he told the Bench that the State was "playing hide and seek" - unwilling even to acknowledge a basic fact about whether criminal proceedings had formally commenced against his client.
Chief Justice Nagu captured the anomaly from the Bench: "I fail to understand what is the hesitation in answering the query as to whether any offence has been registered or not registered." That observation matters. A court asking whether a criminal record exists is not an intrusive or complex demand. It is the threshold question on which everything else depends. The State's continued silence on that point, offered under the formula "I have no instructions", is itself a datum worth examining.
Rai cited newspaper reports suggesting that two FIRs had been registered against Pathak following his change of political allegiance - a sequence of events that, if accurate, would raise obvious questions about the timing and motivation behind the proceedings. He also invoked the Supreme Court's judgment in Youth Bar Association of India, which establishes that once an FIR is registered, it must be uploaded within 24 hours and that an accused has a fundamental right to access that information. The argument is not merely procedural: the right to know whether the State has opened a criminal file against you is a baseline protection that any citizen can claim, regardless of political status.
The Legal Architecture at Stake
Punjab's counsel took two positions simultaneously - both of which the Bench found difficult to reconcile with its own query. First, he argued that the petition was based on speculation and media reports, suggesting that no concrete threat had materialised. Second, he urged that the appropriate remedy was anticipatory bail under the statutory framework, not a writ petition of this nature. The court acknowledged the second point as a matter of settled law: anticipatory bail exists precisely for situations where arrest is apprehended, and those proceedings would in themselves require disclosure of the allegations.
But the argument that the petition is speculative runs directly into the State's refusal to deny the FIRs. If there are no registered offences, that is one sentence to place on record. The State's inability to produce that sentence is what sustains the petition's factual foundation, however speculative its origins. The Bench made this sequencing explicit: it recorded that Punjab's objection to maintainability would be considered only after the State answered the prior query on whether any cognizable offence exists.
Punjab's counsel also raised the concern that compelling disclosure in proceedings of this nature would "open a floodgate" - an argument that courts hear regularly in matters touching police records and investigation confidentiality. That concern has some legal texture: there are provisions under the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita governing when police papers must be supplied, and those provisions are keyed to the filing of a charge sheet, not to writ proceedings. But the floodgate concern does not answer why the State cannot simply confirm or deny the existence of an FIR as a threshold matter, without disclosing investigative details.
Political Context and the Limits of Judicial Protection
Sandeep Pathak's case arrives before the court against a backdrop that is familiar in Indian constitutional litigation: a senior political figure from one party, allegations surfacing after a shift in political alignment, and a state government belonging to a different political formation. Courts do not adjudicate political motivation - that is not their function - but they are equipped to ensure that the machinery of criminal law is not deployed in a procedurally opaque manner.
The interim protection now extended to next week does not determine guilt, innocence, or even the validity of any FIR. It simply requires Punjab to seek the court's permission before arresting or otherwise coercing Pathak. That is a narrow and reversible order. What it does preserve is the court's ability to supervise the situation until it has enough information to decide whether the petition deserves further consideration or should be redirected to anticipatory bail jurisdiction.
The broader principle that Rai pressed - that this is a question of every citizen's rights, not merely a sitting MP's - is constitutionally accurate. The right to know whether the State has opened a criminal case against you does not derive from electoral status. It applies equally to an MP and to anyone whose name appears on a police complaint. The present case may resolve in directions entirely consistent with Punjab's position. But the manner in which the State has handled the court's direct inquiry has, for now, made resolution harder rather than easier.
