NEW DELHI: The Supreme Court on Tuesday reserved orders on whether the police must supply grounds of arrest to persons arrested for offences under the Indian Penal Code (IPC) and non-supply of the same vitiates their arrest.
A bench comprising justices Bhushan R Gavai and justice AG Masih was confronted with this question while considering an appeal filed by Mihir Shah, the accused in the Worli BMW hit-and-run case in July 2024, where a woman was crushed under the wheels leading to her death while her husband survived the incident.
Shah claimed that he was not supplied with grounds of arrest either before his arrest or at the time he was taken into custody on July 9 last year. He argued that this went against the Supreme Court judgments in Pankaj Bansal case (2023) which held that the Enforcement Directorate (ED) was bound to provide written grounds of arrest to the accused arrested under the Prevention of Money Laundering Act (PMLA). This rule was further extended to offences under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) by the top court in Prabir Purkayastha case (May 2024) as the Delhi police had not supplied the NewsClick founder with the grounds of arrest.
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Shah was arrested on July 9 last year, two days after he allegedly rammed his BMW into a two-wheeler in Worli, killing 45-year-old woman Kaveri Nakhwa and leaving her husband Pradeep injured. His driver Bidawat, who was also present in the car at the time of the accident, was arrested on the day of the incident. Mihir Shah’s father and former Shiv Sena leader Rajesh Shah had also been arrested in the case, but was later granted bail.
“The question we are called upon to answer is whether in each and every case, including offences under the IPC, it will be necessary to furnish grounds of arrest to the accused, either before arrest or forthwith after arrest,” the bench said.
Another issue which arises is that in certain cases, due to exigencies, if it is not possible to furnish grounds of arrest, whether arrest will be vitiated under section 50 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) which states that every police officer arresting any person without warrant “shall forthwith communicate to him full particulars of the offence for which he is arrested or other grounds for such arrest.”
The court reserved its verdict on Shah’s petition while making it clear that it will not interfere with the Bombay high court order upholding Shah’s arrest negating his plea of non-supply of grounds of arrest citing that he had full knowledge of his crime.
The court observed that the accused could not be allowed to unduly take advantage of Supreme Court judgments trying to distinguish normal crimes under IPC from those under PMLA, etc. “It is the most inhuman thing. He dragged the woman and did not have the courtesy to get her medical help,” the bench said, referring to the charges against Shah.
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“In IPC, somebody is accused of a direct offence and there are witnesses for the same. Unlike in PMLA, where the arrest is based on a predicate offence and so it is insisted to supply grounds of arrest… We want to strike a balance as we don’t want any accused to take advantage of our observations and get released,” the court said.
Senior advocate Abhishek Manu Singhvi appearing for Shah submitted, “Hard cases should not lead to laying down of bad law,” as he highlighted the constitutional safeguard provided by the top court in its past ruling underlining the need for supplying grounds of arrest.
Advocate Shri Singh assisting the court as amicus curiae pointed out that a distinction must be made between general crimes and crimes under special statutes. In general crimes, he said, while supply of grounds of arrest may be insisted upon, the same should not be fatal so as to vitiate arrest.
The court gave an instance where a person kills 10 persons and insists on grounds of arrest before being taken into custody. Singhvi said that even in a murder case, to insist that no grounds of arrest will be provided is a “pernicious” principle, even as he distinguished that this may not apply to those who remain absconding after committing a crime.
The bench also went on to grant bail to two accused in separate cases tagged with Mihir Shah’s case. While accused in one case related to a commercial transaction, the other accused was Shivani Agarwal, the mother of the teen accused in the Pune Porsche crash case in May last year. She was accused of fabricating evidence to shield her son in the incident which claimed two lives.