Notices in the contempt petition were served a year ago. The State’s response was a letter to the Registry naming a Tehsildar as Contact Officer, after which nothing followed: no counsel, no appearance, no compliance report. The High Court said it had no option but to issue arrest warrants to secure the officers’ presence.
Jabalpur: The Madhya Pradesh High Court has ordered the issuance of arrest warrants against two senior officers of the State Government who neither entered appearance nor filed a compliance report in a contempt petition, despite notices having been served on them a year earlier [Smt Sheela Sen v. Shri Vivek Prowal and Others].
Justice Vivek Jain directed that the warrants be executed by the Commissioner of Police, Bhopal and the Superintendent of Police, Sagar in respect of respondents one and two respectively, and that those authorities ensure the officers’ presence before the Court on September 21, 2026.
The background
The contempt petition was filed in 2025. According to an order of the Registrar J-I dated December 9, 2025, notices appeared to have been served on the respondents in September 2025.
What the State did next is the whole of the case. The Collector, Sagar wrote to the Court on December 3, 2025, informing the Registry that the Tehsildar, Sagar City had been appointed as a Contact Officer to take care of the contempt petition. Nothing further was done. No counsel was engaged, no appearance was entered, and no compliance report was filed.
The Court treated that letter as proof of knowledge rather than as a response, recording that both respondents were fully aware of the pendency of the contempt petition and had even written to the Registry, but had not cared to appear.
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What the Court said
The criticism was directed not merely at the two officers but at the pattern their conduct represented:
“The aforesaid act of the respondents depicts a very sorry state of affairs in the administration of the State Government, whereby they have adopted an absolute inertia in the matter of contempt petitions and they simply write letter to the Registry of this Court informing about appointment of a Contact Officer, but thereafter do not engage a counsel nor file any compliance report.”
Having recorded that, the Court concluded that no alternative remained open to it:
“Therefore, this court has no option but to issue arrest warrants against the respondents.”
The matter has been listed for September 21, 2026.
What the order does not decide
The distinction matters and is easily lost in the reporting of such orders. The Court has not held either officer guilty of contempt. It has recorded no finding on whether its earlier direction was in fact disobeyed, and it has not imposed any punishment under the Contempt of Courts Act, 1971.
An arrest warrant at this stage is coercive process, which is to say a mechanism to compel attendance where a party served with notice has stayed away. Its function is to get the respondents into the courtroom so that the contempt petition can actually be heard. Whether contempt is made out, and whether any explanation offered answers it, are questions that arise only after that.
It should also be noted that the officers have not been heard, for the straightforward reason that they did not appear. The order records their conduct in the proceedings; it does not adjudicate their defence, because none has been placed before the Court.
Why it matters
The sharpest line in a short order is the one about the Contact Officer, because it identifies a practice rather than a lapse. Appointing a nodal or contact officer for court cases is an ordinary and sensible administrative step. What the Court objected to was the appointment being treated as the whole of the department’s obligation, so that a routing arrangement inside the government is mistaken for a response to the Court.
The scale of the underlying problem is not in dispute. The Union Law Ministry has itself written to government departments about compliance, with well over a lakh contempt cases pending against government bodies across the country. The overwhelming majority arise not from defiance but from inaction, where a direction to decide a representation or release a benefit simply goes unactioned until the litigant returns to court.
High Courts have responded with a range of coercive measures short of punishment, including directions to withhold salaries, personal appearance of secretaries, and warrants of the kind issued here. The effectiveness of these is debatable and the burden of them falls unevenly, since the officer in the dock is frequently not the one who caused the original default and may have been posted elsewhere by the time the matter is heard.
There is a countervailing consideration too. The Supreme Court has repeatedly cautioned against the routine summoning of government officers, and in January 2024 issued a Standard Operating Procedure on the personal appearance of government officials in court proceedings, discouraging appearance as a means of expressing displeasure and encouraging the use of video conferencing. That guidance, however, addresses officers being called in the first instance. It does not readily cover a case in which notice was served, receipt was acknowledged in writing, and the respondents then stayed away for a year, which is the situation the High Court was confronted with.
Whether the warrants are executed or the officers appear and satisfy the Court will be known on September 21.
Case Title: Smt Sheela Sen v. Shri Vivek Prowal and Others [CONC No. 4449 of 2025]
Bench: Justice Vivek Jain, High Court of Madhya Pradesh at Jabalpur
Date of Order: September 10, 2026 | Next Listed: September 21, 2026
Appearances: Advocates Kavita Gupta and Vidya Prasad for the petitioner. No appearance was entered on behalf of the respondents.