From a call for the Bareilly SSP’s personal affidavit to a line of regret on the record: the Allahabad High Court has said it “sincerely regrets” the verbal harshness it showed the officer over missing CCTV footage, after finding that the habeas corpus petitioner had hidden an earlier petition on the same facts. The petitioner has been ordered to pay Rs 50,000 in costs to the officer.
Prayagraj: Two habeas corpus petitions filed by the same man have been dismissed by the Allahabad High Court, which held that he did not approach the Court with clean hands and indulged in suppressio veri and suggestio falsi. Costs of Rs 25,000 per petition are payable to the Senior Superintendent of Police (SSP), Bareilly, for the inconvenience caused to him [Omendra Yadav v. State of U.P. and 4 others].
A Division Bench of Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Achal Sachdev passed the order on October 30, 2026 in Habeas Corpus Writ Petition No. 605 of 2026, decided along with Habeas Corpus Writ Petition No. 746 of 2026.
What the second petition left out
By October 30, the Bench had found that the petitioner, Omendra Yadav, filed a second habeas corpus petition on May 26, after the State filed its counter-affidavit in the first petition on May 18. The second petition, the Court noted, was presented as the first under Article 226, contained no mandatory disclosure of the earlier petition, and sought release by referring to detention under the remand order of May 13.
The first petition, the Court also found, contained no specific averment on the date, place or time when the petitioner was taken into police custody. An averment of illegal detention since May 8 appeared only in the supporting affidavit, which, the Bench said, could not stand in for a pleading absent from the petition itself. The second petition, it held, sought to cure those gaps while hiding that the first had been filed.
How the SSP came to be called in
In the first petition, Yadav claimed he had been illegally detained by the local police in Bareilly from May 8, 2026 until his formal arrest on May 13, 2026. His counsel sought the police station’s CCTV footage to establish the detention. The State said heavy rain and a storm had damaged the CCTV system and DVR through a short circuit.
On May 26, a coordinate Bench directed the Bareilly SSP, Anurag Arya, to file a personal affidavit explaining how the cameras stopped working, whether he had been informed at once, and why the lapse occurred despite the Supreme Court’s directions in Paramvir Singh Saini v. Baljit Singh. The SSP filed that affidavit.
The present Bench questioned the explanation on October 27, noting that the affidavit did not adequately explain how a storm affected cameras inside the police station, or how damage between May 13 and 15 could have affected recordings of earlier days. It observed that the SSP prima facie appeared to have filed a false affidavit and called for his personal appearance.
Regret on record, and blame on the AGA office
The Bench said the Additional Government Advocate’s office should have told it at the outset that the petition was an abuse of process. Had that been done, it would not have made the SSP the target of its displeasure:
“…would not have made the Senior Superintendent of Police, Bareilly the subject of its angst, which this Court records in this order that it sincerely regrets having subjected to such verbal harshness which was unwarranted. The fault lies at the doorstep of the A.G.A. Office with the petitioner for having hidden the true facts from this Court and not approached the Court with clean hands and indulging in an abuse of process.”
The costs
“…both these petitions are dismissed for having approached the Court without clean hands and having indulged in suppressio veri and suggestio falsi, and for the inconvenience caused to the Senior Superintendent of Police, Bareilly, a cost of Rs.25,000/- per petition (Rs.50,000/- in total) is imposed upon the petitioner which shall be paid to the Senior Superintendent of Police, Bareilly within a period of one month…”
If the amount is not paid, it is to be recovered as arrears of revenue and handed to the SSP. The Court noted that the petitioner has since been released on bail.
Why the order matters
Habeas corpus is the most urgent remedy a court can give, and it depends on full and candid disclosure. Filing a second petition on the same facts without disclosing the first is a classic case of suppressio veri and suggestio falsi, and the settled rule is that a litigant who approaches a writ court with unclean hands can be turned away without any examination of the merits.
The order is also unusual for its candour. A constitutional court has placed on record its regret for remarks made to a police officer, and has pointed to the State’s own law officers for failing to flag the concealment at the outset. It shows that the duty to assist the court accurately rests on government counsel as much as on private litigants, and that the costs of a misled hearing can be directed to the person who bore its brunt.
Case Title: Omendra Yadav v. State of U.P. and 4 others [Habeas Corpus Writ Petition No. 605 of 2026, with Habeas Corpus Writ Petition No. 746 of 2026; 2026:AHC:225961-DB]
Bench: Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Achal Sachdev, Allahabad High Court
Date of Order: October 30, 2026
For the Petitioner: Senior Advocate Mahendra Pratap, with Advocate Anurag Yadav
For the State: Additional Advocate General Anoop Trivedi, with Additional Government Advocate Nitesh Kumar Srivastava