The CJP Order and the limits of Article 142

On 1 September, the Supreme Court invoked Article 142 of the Constitution to quash 129 First Information Reports (FIRs) registered across different States against students who protested against the NEET-UG 2026 irregularities. The Court also banned any fresh FIR anywhere in the country over the same events. It directed the Union to devise a pan-India compensation policy for students who died by suicide in connection with the examination. The Supreme Court then recorded the decision of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a pseudo-parody party, to call off a subsequent protest march to be held on 5 September. 

The Order was hailed by human rights lawyers, civil servants, and the spokesperson of the CJP as a vindication of the right to protest. In a recent critique, Advocate Gautam Bhatia has rightly highlighted what the Order does to individual criminal responsibility and to the doctrine of precedent.

In this commentary, I argue that no petition before the Court appears to have sought the relief the CJP order grants. The mass registration of the FIRs was treated as a dispute to be settled. It did not examine whether the registration itself was an abuse of process. 

As an exception, it identified 2873 individuals who had serious criminal antecedents and were prima facie reported to have been present at the protest site. The individuals were identified from a police affidavit which was admittedly unverified. In simple terms, this is not “complete justice”, but rather a (failed) mediation that borrowed the Court as a venue for a final settlement.

A settlement without a cause

On 20 July 2026, the CJP, together with students, organised the Sansad Chalo march towards Parliament against the paper-leak issues. Between 20 and 25 July, thousands of people, including students, protested across Delhi, Bihar, West Bengal, Assam and Maharashtra. In the weeks that followed, multiple writ petitions were filed before the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court. They raised distinct concerns: the Delhi Police’s use of excessive force on student protesters, use of facial recognition and biometric surveillance at Jantar Mantar, and online doxxing, 

Two such public interest litigation (PIL) petitions were filed by Shailendra Mani Tripathi and Yashovardhan Azad before the Supreme Court, concerning the use of lathi charge, deployment of pellet guns and the use of tear gas by the Rapid Action Force against protestors. On 3 August, the Supreme Court said that the Delhi police and other States may close or withdraw the FIRs in accordance with law.

On 31 August, the Delhi Police filed an application, invoking Article 142. Similar applications subsequently emerged from Bihar, West Bengal, Assam and Maharashtra. Article 142(1) empowers the Court to do “complete justice” only in the exercise of its jurisdiction, in any cause or matter pending before it. That qualifying clause is not decorative. 

In Supreme Court Bar Association v Union of India (1998), a Constitution Bench held that Article 142 supplies no jurisdiction when the relief sought is not the subject matter of the cause actually before the Court. In Union Carbide v Union of India (1991), the Court read “cause or matter” more generously. It extends the phrase to whatever is genuinely connected with the pending dispute, in a way that assists complete justice in that dispute. Even on that wider test, some connection is required.

No petition in this batch, neither Tripathi’s nor Azad’s, ever prayed for the quashing of an FIR. Each sought relief against the State, accountability for the use of pellet guns, for excessive force and protection from surveillance. The Article 142 route absolved the State of the consequences of the very conduct these petitions complained of. This was done at the State’s own request in an application moved by the State itself. The respondents—the police force—requested that the Court extinguish any allegations questioning their conduct.

The objection, therefore, is not that Article 142 could never reach the FIRs—it is that the Court’s exercise of that power cannot substitute for adjudication of the constitutional questions that formed the subject matter of the pending proceedings.

There is also a question the doctrine itself invites. If the State violated the right to protest by mass FIR registration, does “complete justice” consist merely in quashing the FIRs? 

It does not address the wrong. A pellet injury on a student cannot be undone. Complete justice should ask what compensates the student for the violation and not only what relieves the student of its legal consequence.

Constituting an inquiry committee for bypassing?

The Court had the means to question the mass registration of FIRs. On 18 August, the Court constituted a High Powered Enquiry Committee chaired by Justice R. Subhash Reddy, a former judge of the Supreme Court. The Committee was to look at a checklist of questions involving proportionality of police force at the protests, the plea to ban pellet guns, the surveillance of protesters, the use of Section 163 of the BNSS to issue blanket prohibitory orders, and safeguards against Section 152 of the BNS being used to stifle dissent. The Court directed the preservation of all CCTV, drone and body-worn camera footage. Further, all PCR call logs from the protest were to be handed to the Committee. Paragraph 19 of that Order stated that the Court will determine broader constitutional questions in due course.

The Order quashing FIRs does not mention the Committee and neither does it wait for it to file an interim report. The record does not suggest that the Committee had examined a single FIR, preserved footage or a single question by the time the Court quashed the FIRs. A Bench that had told the country, in writing, three weeks earlier, that these questions required judicial nuance and would be decided by the Court, turned the other way by accepting the executive’s own account of its conduct.

Applying the test of quashing to the FIRs across five States would have produced a finding that the registration was unlawful, something that the students could have relied on if the same tactic were used again. The CJP order records only that the Union and the applicant-States “have taken a conscious decision not to pursue” the FIRs, and treats that decision as the basis for invoking Article 142. Thus, the protesters’ fundamental right was not vindicated; it was simply administratively spared.

Delhi Police’s own chart, annexed to its application, lists offences ranging from rioting to attempted murder and robbery, mixed across the FIRs it asks the Court to quash as a single set. The Order does not suggest that any individual FIR was examined before it was added to the schedule. A charge of attempt to murder and a charge of unlawful assembly were quashed by the same stroke, because both happened to arise from the same five days.

Bihar’s affidavit illustrates the same problem. It reports a total of 69 cases registered between 22 and 25 July against 1843 accused, of whom only 86 had any criminal record at all. An impleadment filed by Ankit Kumar states that he was named, along with 144 other individuals and 5000 unidentified persons, in an FIR dated 25 July. That FIR number does not appear anywhere in Bihar’s own list of 69. The question which arises is, if the State’s own affidavit omits an FIR its own police force is shown to have registered, on facts placed on record by one of the very people named in it, does this not suggest the need for verification of the State’s consolidated list before relying on it?

Nine days later, the Bench confirmed as much. On 10 September, it told parties that whether pellet guns should be used at all, and the legality of Delhi Police outsourcing protester data collection to private companies, would remain for the Court to consider, separate from the HPEC’s fact-finding. Neither question had been touched by the settlement— the Court had quashed the FIRs without adjudicating the legality of the police conduct that had given rise to the underlying petitions.

What about the other 2873 protestors?

The registration of fresh FIRs against the 2873 individuals with “criminal antecedents” deserves scrutiny. The Delhi police’s affidavit stated that facial recognition matching at the protest site identified 2873 persons with existing criminal records. 2402 of these matched the Crime Kundli database and 471 from dossier records. The same affidavit states that only 92 had involvement in more than ten cases, and 47 of those were history-sheeters. The remaining 2781 individuals are single or low-frequency database matches. 

The application seeking Article 142 relief drops this breakdown entirely. It states that the whole figure was drawn from the National Crime Records Bureau database. The CJP order repeats that description without engaging with the more specific breakdown the police force had given. An Indian Express investigation examined 205 names on that list linked to serious offences and found that at least 25, including 17 facing murder charges, were in Delhi’s Tihar, Mandoli or Rohini prisons on the very dates the Affidavit/Application claimed to have detected them at Jantar Mantar. In the sample checked, better than one in ten of the “identifications” was demonstrably wrong.

The CJP order’s own stated standard makes this worse. On 3 August, the Court had clarified that “criminal antecedents” for these purposes meant only “grave and heinous offences.” Whether the 2873 names were filtered to the standard the Court had set is not something the order examines. The Indian Express investigation does nothing to inspire confidence that the filtering was done at all. The Court had, in any event, already ordered the preservation of footage and logs for exactly this kind of verification.

Three separate defects follow: First, the sorting criterion has no relationship to the standard set by the Court. The stated justification for excluding these 2873 people from the general quashing is the possibility of “bodily harm” or “destruction of public property”. The mechanism used to build the list was not evidence of conduct at the protest, it was a facial match against an unrelated database of prior criminal history. The Supreme Court has itself held, repeatedly and as recently as this year, that criminal antecedents cannot by themselves determine an individual’s treatment in a specific matter. Second, the Court accepted a list built this way for an exception to its own order without requiring the verification the police’s affidavit said was still pending. The error rate uncovered afterwards was not a risk the order accounted for. 

Third, all 2873 individuals were identified using facial recognition technology, and the Court did not question whether the use of facial recognition at Jantar Mantar was justified.

Relief, not Vindication

Notably, while quashing the FIRs, the Court nowhere holds that mass registrations violated Article 19. A protester whose FIR is quashed has been relieved of a criminal proceeding. It does not vindicate the right to protest under Article 19(1)(b). The order does not engage with indiscriminate criminalisation of a peaceful assembly, now compounded by biometric surveillance.

The Court recorded the CJP’s decision to withdraw its call for a 5 September march, while expressing its appreciation to the CJP’s leadership for its cooperation. Read together, these paragraphs come closer to treating the withdrawal of a prospective assembly (in light of the international event BRICS 2026) as consideration for relief than as an unrelated, coincidental motive. Union Carbide itself preserves that distinction as dropping a prosecution can be a legitimate motive for a settlement without falling foul of the stifling-of-prosecution doctrine, but it cannot be the consideration extracted for it (emphasis mine). If the FIRs were unlawful, the only premise on which quashing them under Article 142 makes sense, the protesters were entitled to that relief whether or not any march was withdrawn. Structuring the order as an exchange treats an Article 19(1)(b) freedom as something to be traded for the withdrawal of an unlawful prosecution. Prem Chand Garg v. Excise Commissioner (1962) held, in a different context, that Article 142 cannot be used to make an order inconsistent with Part III. An order that makes relief from unlawful process contingent, even implicitly, on the forfeiture of a fundamental freedom sits uncomfortably close to that line.

An escape from adjudication

Taken together, this is not the picture of a constitutional court exercising its widest power to vindicate a right. It is the picture of a court that brokered a settlement, accepted an unverified list as the price of the settlement, declared the whole thing devoid of precedential value, and left every constitutional question, and the practice that produced them, exactly where it found them. A constitutional court is defined by what it is prepared to decide, not by the width of the remedial power it is willing to invoke while deciding nothing. In the CJP Order, the Court had both options available to it and chose the latter.

Sarthak Gupta is a New Delhi-based advocate and Researcher at Columbia University, New York, working on a project on free speech, media laws and censorship. He has previously served as a law clerk in the Supreme Court.