The Centre is set to ask the Supreme Court to quash FIRs against July’s student protesters under Article 142, days before the CJP’s September 5 march, with a carve-out for grave offences.
New Delhi: The Central Government is set to move the Supreme Court seeking to quash the FIRs registered against students who took part in the July protests over the examination-paper leak, invoking the Court’s extraordinary powers under Article 142 of the Constitution — a move that comes days before a protest march announced by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) on September 5 over the very grievance that the cases had not been withdrawn [application in Shailendra Mani Tripathi v. Union of India and Others].
Solicitor General Tushar Mehta orally mentioned the matter before Chief Justice of India Surya Kant as the Bench was about to rise, seeking an urgent listing. When the Chief Justice asked what the application concerned and what the urgency was, the Solicitor General said it related to the protest and the quashing of the FIRs, and that the Centre was invoking Article 142. The Chief Justice permitted the filing, and the matter is expected to be taken up on Tuesday.
‘We are invoking Article 142’
The brief exchange in court set out both the substance of the application and the spirit in which the Government said it was being brought. The Solicitor General told the Court:
“It’s regarding that protest… for quashing of FIRs… We are invoking Article 142.”
The Chief Justice, indicating no difficulty with an early hearing where the object was to bring the dispute to a close, responded:
“Alright, you file. If parties are reconciling… we have no difficulty.”
The Government’s decision to seek the quashing itself rather than merely to withdraw the prosecutions reflects a legal complication the Court had already identified. At the hearing on August 18, the Court was told that retracting the FIRs was not straightforward: once an FIR is registered, it can ordinarily be closed only by the police filing a closure report, which the concerned Magistrate has the discretion to accept or reject. That discretion meant the executive could not, on its own, guarantee the withdrawal it had promised and it was in that context that the Court had itself expressed an inclination to use its Article 142 powers to quash the FIRs.
Why Article 142 is the route chosen
The choice of Article 142 is the legally significant feature of this development, and it is worth understanding why. Article 142 empowers the Supreme Court to pass any order “necessary for doing complete justice” in a matter before it a plenary power that allows the Court to cut through procedural obstacles that would otherwise bind the ordinary criminal process. A quashing under Article 142 does not depend on a Magistrate accepting a closure report; it is an order of the apex court itself, extinguishing the proceedings directly. That is precisely what makes it suited to a situation where a large number of FIRs across multiple States must be brought to an end at once, and where the normal route closure reports subject to individual magisterial discretion could produce inconsistent or contested outcomes.
At the same time, the invocation of Article 142 to wipe out a body of criminal cases is not without its own sensitivities: it involves the Court exercising an exceptional constitutional power to terminate prosecutions before trial, and the terms on which it does so which FIRs, on what conditions, and with what carve-outs will determine both the relief the students receive and the limits the Court sets on the exercise.
The carve-out for grave offences
A crucial qualification, flagged at the earlier hearing, is that the relief is not intended to be blanket. The Solicitor General had submitted on August 18 that while the cases against ordinary student protesters should be quashed, an exception would have to be made for those accused of grave and heinous offences. He had put the number of such individuals at around 2,873 persons facing allegations of offences such as murder, rape and abduction and said that the allegations concerning anti-social elements who had allegedly infiltrated the protests would still have to be investigated.
The distinction the Government drew quashing for the general body of student protesters, continued investigation for those accused of serious crimes is the line the Court is likely to work with when it considers the application, and it mirrors the approach the Bench had earlier signalled: protecting peaceful protesters from the burden of prosecution while preserving the criminal process against genuine offenders.
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The backdrop: a promise, a protest, and a court-monitored inquiry
The application does not arise in a vacuum. The withdrawal of the cases against the student protesters was one of the conditions the Cockroach Janata Party had put forward for calling off the July agitation, which ended on July 25 following the resignation of the Union Education Minister. The CJP has announced its September 5 march precisely on the allegation that the Centre failed to honour that commitment and the Government’s decision to file the quashing application now, ahead of that march, links the two developments directly, whatever view one takes of the timing.
The move also sits within the larger student-protest litigation the same Bench has been supervising the batch of petitions alleging excessive police force at Jantar Mantar and elsewhere, in which the Court has already constituted a high-powered committee headed by a former Supreme Court judge to examine the allegations, directed the release of detained minors, and clarified that peaceful protesters without criminal antecedents should not face coercive action. The quashing application is, in that sense, the next logical step in a process the Court has steered from the outset: having protected the students from coercive measures and set up a mechanism to probe the policing of the protests, the question of formally ending the FIRs against them is what now falls to be decided. Nothing has yet been ordered on the application, which is to be filed and taken up when the Court lists it.