New Delhi: Hearing student-activist Devangana Kalita’s plea last week in connection with a 2020 Delhi riots case, the Delhi High Court once again underlined the role in criminal trials of case diaries maintained by the police.
Kalita had sought preservation and reconstruction of specific case diary booklets, apprehending some of the statements recorded in the case under Section 161 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC)—which grants a police officer authority to examine any person acquainted with a case, to gather evidence—might have been antedated.
The bench led by Justice Ravinder Dudeja reaffirmed that case diaries are not evidence by themselves, but their absence may affect the fairness of a trial.
While Kalita’s concerns about possible fabrication of timelines were noted, the high court ruled such issues must be tested during trial.
Crucially, the high court emphasised that section 172 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) empowers judges to inspect diaries, but the accused has no right to demand inspection or reconstruction of entries beyond what the law permits.
Kalita’s case was not an isolated one. It is part of a growing trail of instances where courts are forced to remind the police that the case diary is not a private notebook but a statutory record—one that exists to aid judicial supervision.
What is case diary
A case diary is a bound booklet issued by the police department with pre-printed page numbers, where the investigating officer must enter, on a day-to-day basis, the time at which information was received, places visited in connection with the probe, persons questioned, and steps taken as part of the investigation.
Each entry is supposed to be continuous, dated, and signed, so that there is no scope for interpolation or substitution. Because it is an official, serially numbered booklet (not loose sheets), it provides a chronological narrative of the progress of investigation.
Section 172 of the CrPC lays down strict duties for police officers. Sub section 1 mandates that the investigating officer (IO) must maintain a day-to-day record, noting time, place, and progress of the investigation.
Sub-section 2 empowers any criminal court to call for these diaries and examine them.
Sub-section 3 says that the accused has no right to inspect the diary, though courts may use it to test contradictions or refresh an officer’s memory. The provision reflects a deliberate balance. Diaries give courts a window into the investigation, without disclosing sensitive details to the defence that might endanger witnesses or compromise police work.
Yet on the ground, missing entries, loose sheets, and vanished records repeatedly frustrate that authority. Even though criminal courts don’t call for a case diary in every case, it is a barometer of investigative integrity and its absence speaks volumes.
Why case diaries matter
Indian courts have consistently highlighted the importance of police diaries. In the Shyamlal Sharma v. King Emperor (1949), the Federal Court described them as an aid to judges, though not substantive evidence. In Mukund Lal v. Union of India (1989), the Supreme Court upheld restrictions on defence access but reaffirmed that courts have absolute discretion to summon and examine diaries whenever justice requires.
This judicial philosophy was visible again in August 2025, when Delhi’s Karkardooma Court acquitted six men in a Delhi riots case after finding that the IO had fabricated evidence.
“There has been an egregious padding of evidence by the IO and this has resulted in serious trampling of the rights of the accused,” the court observed, forwarding its order to the police commissioner, thereby highlighting the travesty of justice against the accused.
The message across judgments is clear: the case diary is essential for judicial oversight of police power. But what happens when the diary itself goes missing?
In July 2025, the Delhi High Court was alarmed to discover gaps in the case diaries of a murder trial. Entries stopped at diary number 19 (27 February), then abruptly jumped to 39, 42, and 44, leaving crucial dates undocumented. When questioned, the investigating officer claimed the missing diaries “might have been destroyed or removed”.
Justice Girish Kathpalia did not mince words. “This completely takes away the sanctity of the investigation and raises suspicion against its genuineness,” he noted. The court warned that without a complete diary, the fairness of the trial was jeopardised.
Thus, bail was granted to Banti Kumar Mathur, accused in the killing of Gulshan, who had been allegedly abducted, dragged, and beaten to death over an old enmity.
The probe into the infamous Behmai massacre, where Phoolan Devi’s gang allegedly killed 20 men in 1981, hit a roadblock in 2020 when the case diary went missing. A special judge in Uttar Pradesh had to postpone the pronouncement of the verdict because the record, critical to judicial scrutiny, had simply vanished.
Even in the high-profile hit-and-run case involving actor Salman Khan, a Mumbai court in 2014 expressed dissatisfaction and even questioned the police over missing case diaries and original documents. The police submitted that the documents were kept in a magistrate’s court where the trial was usually held.
However, after the charge of culpable homicide was added to the case against Khan and the trial got shifted to the sessions court, the original documents and case diaries were untraceable, raising doubts over the reliability of the police investigation.
The Bombay High Court in 2015 overturned a trial court order, acquitting Khan and cancelling the five-year jail sentence handed to him.
‘Backbone of any investigation’
In September 2025, the Lucknow Police admitted that 87 case diaries and 40 supplementary reports from a 2006 dacoity case had disappeared from the Madiaon police station, a serious gap and lapse in documenting the investigation. Though the diaries were recorded as “handed over”, they never reached the trial court. Nearly two decades later, the trial remains stalled. Rather fresh FIRs had to be filed against two policemen.
In January 2025, more than 11 case diaries went missing from the Kalyanpur police station near Uttar Pradesh’s Kanpur. The diaries covered multiple serious cases between 2008 and 2014 including murder, molestation, kidnapping, attempt to murder and forgery.
An official inquiry found that the diaries were neither in the station’s records nor submitted to the courts. An FIR was filed against 16 police personnel, including seven sub-inspectors. Kalyanpur ACP submitted in the court that case diaries form the “backbone of any investigation. They detail every aspect required for prosecution.”
The Bombay High Court has had its share of frustrations in this area. In June 2024, a bench expressed “sheer anguish” when it discovered that police diaries were maintained on loose sheets instead of bound, paginated volumes.
In July 2024, during a hearing on a petition, police handed over unbound papers again.
“This is not the way the case diary is to be maintained”, the court remarked, reminding police of Section 172(1-B), which mandates bound volumes with serial numbering. The lapse, it said, was not minor but a serious statutory violation undermining judicial scrutiny.
Repeated calls for reforms
High courts have repeatedly issued directions to fix the system. In July 2025 while hearing a petition to reject an FIR, the Bombay High Court asked the DGP to circulate strict instructions for bound diaries. The same month, while deciding the bail plea of a murder accused, the Delhi High Court recommended departmental inquiries into missing records.
This year, the Bombay High Court separately urged digitisation of diaries with audit trails to prevent tampering. The Delhi police had similarly mooted online diary systems as early as 2020, but implementation remains limited to a few stations.
An e-diary is the digital version of the traditional case diary, introduced in some states to curb tampering and loss of records. Instead of handwritten bound booklets, investigating officers upload daily entries into a secure, centralised portal that automatically timestamps and serially numbers each entry. This creates an audit trail that cannot be erased or altered without leaving a digital footprint, making the record more reliable.
But the implementation rate is very low. There also is concern that it may lead to surveillance and antedating the information can be accessed from more than one device.
Courts have repeatedly called for better maintenance of case diaries, underlining that unless police treat diary-keeping a serious statutory and ethical duty, Section 172 risks becoming a hollow safeguard: powerful in theory, powerless in practice.
Missing accountability, deepening opacity
Unlike India, many jurisdictions treat fair disclosure as a cornerstone of justice. In the United States, for instance, the prosecution must disclose all material evidence to the defence under the Brady rule. In the United Kingdom, prosecutors must disclose even unused material that could weaken their case.
India, however, denies defence access to case diaries altogether, leaving oversight solely to the judiciary. If diaries are poorly maintained or not produced, the result is opacity, undermining both transparency and accountability.
Senior Advocate Rebecca John, who has practised criminal law for nearly three decades, argues that the secrecy around diaries is a structural flaw. “Courts very rarely look at case diaries so it is an easy document to go missing.”
She suggests that if the accused could potentially have access to it after the investigation is over that would be a check on the prosecuting agency to prevent it from going missing.
“While I understand that during investigation, you would want to keep a few things undisclosed, the rationale behind keeping the case diary private once the investigation is over is never understood by me,” she tells ThePrint.
Adding, “In America, fair disclosure is integral to their legal system. If anything is found to be hidden from the accused person, then that itself is ground for mistrial. In India, a lot of stuff which is part of the investigation is never revealed. Courts may chasten the investigating officer or write to his superior, but there are no legal or penal consequences for a case diary going missing.”
She goes on to add, “That is not good enough because people’s lives are on the line and when people’s lives are on the line, a more robust system should be in place to ensure that all actors in that framework conduct themselves in a manner which ensures that nobody gets away with falsehoods.”
John attributes the problem to lack of accountability, highlighting that when there is an obligation to share something with the opposite side, automatically accountability increases because there is a check. “Sharing case diaries is part of the fair disclosure process which makes the trial fair. By concealing it from an accused person, you have already given an undue advantage to the other side.”
(Edited by Ajeet Tiwari)