The dispute was a mundane one, water seeping from a village drain onto a man’s farmland, and on that the High Court found no reason to interfere. But buried in the order rejecting his grievance was something the Court would not let stand: the District Magistrate had branded the complainant as a person with a ‘mentality to harass’ members of the SC/ST community, an aspersion with no foundation in the record. Holding that a quasi-judicial authority decides on facts and law and has no business attacking a litigant’s character, the Court expunged the remarks, reaching, to make the point, for Othello.
Patna: The Patna High Court has expunged the uncharitable and unwarranted personal remarks made by the District Magistrate, Sitamarhi, against a complainant while deciding an appeal under the Bihar Public Grievance Redressal Act, 2015, holding that a quasi-judicial authority cannot cast aspersions on the personal character of a litigant unrelated to the merits of the dispute [Dr. Dev Narayan Jha v. The State of Bihar and Others].
Justice Alok Kumar declined to interfere with the substantive orders on the petitioner’s grievance, but expunged the personal aspersions to the extent they appeared in the District Magistrate’s order.
The background
The petitioner, described as a scholar of Sanskrit who has held the office of Vice-Chancellor of a State University, had complained that a drain constructed under a government scheme in his village had clogged, causing water to seep into his agricultural land and hinder farming. His grievance travelled through the tiers of the Bihar Public Grievance Redressal Act: the Sub Divisional Grievance Redressal Officer directed repair of the drain and closed the matter; the first appeal was dismissed; and the second appeal, before the District Magistrate-cum-Second Appellate Authority, was dismissed by an order of February 2023.
It was in that second-appeal order that the District Magistrate recorded that the petitioner, as complainant, appeared to have a mentality to harass persons belonging to the SC/ST communities residing in the neighbourhood, and directed an enquiry. A review before the Divisional Commissioner was rejected on the ground that the Act does not provide for review, and the petitioner then moved the High Court, challenging the remarks as stigmatic, baseless and an abuse of power.
Grievance on merits: no interference
On the substance of the drainage grievance, the Court declined to intervene. It noted the State’s case, supported by a joint report of the Circle Officer and Block Development Officer filed pursuant to an earlier direction of the Court, that on physical verification the drain was found dry with no water flow, that no water-logging was visible on the petitioner’s land, and that there was no source from which a continuous flow could reach his land. In view of that report, the Court held it was not inclined to interfere with the impugned orders rejecting the grievance.
The State had also submitted that the remarks were protected under Section 10 of the Act, which bars legal proceedings against acts done in good faith under the Act. That protection, however, did not deter the Court from addressing the propriety of the remarks themselves.
The remarks: an abuse of power
Turning to the aspersions, the Court held that they required serious consideration because they impacted an individual’s reputation. It laid down the governing principle in plain terms:
“…quasi-judicial authorities must decide cases based strictly on facts and law, personal remarks, insults, or biased observations violate the core principle of a fair and objective hearing. The scope of a quasi-judicial body is limited to resolving the specific dispute before it; commenting on the personal character, morality or background of a litigant, unrelated to legal merits is an abuse of power.”
Superior courts, it noted, have repeatedly held that lower courts, tribunals and quasi-judicial authorities must use sober, temperate and respectful language. The Court relied on the Supreme Court’s decision in A.M. Mathur v. Pramod Kumar Gupta, in which it was observed that judicial restraint and discipline are as necessary to the orderly administration of justice as they are to the effectiveness of an army, and that judges and quasi-judicial authorities must use temperate language and focus strictly on the merits rather than attacking personal character.
To underline the value of reputation, the Court invoked the well-known passage from Shakespeare’s Othello, that a good name is “the immediate jewel of their souls”, and that he who filches it “robs me of that which not enriches him / And makes me poor indeed”. The crux, the Court explained, is that a person’s good reputation is their most valuable possession, priceless where material wealth is fleeting, and that destroying someone’s name benefits no one while leaving the victim ruined.
The outcome
Holding that a quasi-judicial authority is not expected to make passing references to matters outside the record or irrelevant to the adjudication, the Court found that the uncharitable and unwarranted comments made by the District Magistrate against the petitioner needed to be reprimanded. It accordingly expunged the order of February 25, 2023 to the extent it made personal aspersions against the petitioner, and disposed of the writ petition.
Why it matters
The judgment is a clean illustration of a principle that applies well beyond this small grievance: an authority exercising quasi-judicial power, whether a tribunal, a revenue officer or a District Magistrate hearing an appeal, is confined to the dispute before it, and has no licence to editorialise about the litigant’s character. Adverse observations about a person’s morality or motives, untethered from the legal question, serve no adjudicatory purpose and can inflict real and lasting damage on reputation, which the courts increasingly recognise as an aspect of the right to life and dignity. That is why superior courts treat the power to expunge such remarks as an important corrective.
The way the Court split the case is instructive. It did not use the offensive remarks as a reason to reopen the merits; on the drainage dispute, faced with a physical-verification report that found no water-logging, it left the authorities’ conclusion undisturbed. What it corrected was the excess, the gratuitous branding of the complainant, and it did so surgically, expunging only the personal aspersions while leaving the operative decision intact. That is the disciplined use of the expunging power: it targets the impropriety without rewarding a litigant who has lost on the substance.
The Court’s reach for A.M. Mathur and for Shakespeare is more than ornament. It signals that the requirement of temperate language is not a matter of etiquette but of fairness: a hearing in which the decision-maker descends to insult is not an objective hearing, and a reputation destroyed by an official’s stray, unfounded remark is not easily rebuilt. For quasi-judicial authorities across the administrative apparatus, the message is that findings must rest on the record, and that the order sheet is not a place for personal opinion about those who come before them.
Case Title: Dr. Dev Narayan Jha v. The State of Bihar and Others [Civil Writ Jurisdiction Case No. 6198 of 2024]
Bench: Justice Alok Kumar, High Court of Judicature at Patna
Date of Judgment: September 18, 2026
Status: Writ petition disposed of. Orders on the grievance not interfered with; personal aspersions in the District Magistrate’s order of February 25, 2023 expunged.