Gurugram: The Punjab and Haryana High Court has called for a national database to flag habitual complainants in criminal cases. A national-level portal, the court said, should be considered, one that would let investigating agencies access the antecedents of habitual litigants, with adequate safeguards to protect individual privacy.
The observation came from Justice Sanjay Vashisth on Monday, while he was deciding a bail plea that had apparently little to do with database policy. The petitioner, Kashish Uppal, alias Sofia Uppal, had been in custody since 13 March 2024 in connection with a case registered at the State Crime Police Station in SAS Nagar, Mohali.
The FIR, filed in August 2023, accused her of criminal conspiracy, extortion, forgery and related offences under the Indian Penal Code, since reclassified under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita.
The prosecution’s case, as recorded in the order, was that Uppal had conspired with a co-accused, Veronika alias Divyanshi Kanwar, to get multiple false rape cases registered against men in Punjab and Delhi. The motive, investigators said, was to extort money from the men once the cases were filed.
A status report placed before the court listed four such FIRs, all lodged by the same complainant, Kashish Uppal, between 2021 and 2022, against four different men in Amritsar, Ludhiana, Patiala and Delhi. Of these, one ended in an untraceable report accepted by a district court, one in an acquittal, and one with the accused declared innocent by the trial court. One is pending before a Delhi court.
Uppal’s counsel, advocate Sandeep Saini, argued that she had already spent nearly two years and six months in custody, that a co-accused had been granted bail by the trial court and later declared innocent, and that another co-accused, Kanwar, had been granted bail by a coordinate bench of the high court in July last year after 14 months in custody.
Of 30 prosecution witnesses, the counsel pointed out, only two had been examined so far.
The state opposed the plea, calling the allegations serious and pointing to the same witness numbers to argue the trial was still at an early stage.
Justice Vashisth granted bail, holding that the trial was unlikely to conclude soon given the pace of witness examination, and that co-accused persons in the same case had already secured release. The court made clear it was not expressing any opinion on the merits of the case.
It was before parting with the order that the judge turned to the broader concern. Cases involving allegations of habitual complaint-filing, he said, are ones where the antecedents of the complainant, or the accused, can have real relevance.
A national portal recording such antecedents, he suggested, would help both police and courts take an informed view at the appropriate stage, without compromising the privacy of those whose details are recorded.
The court clarified that the observation was not to be read as a finding on the present case, which will proceed before the trial court on its own evidence.
(Edited by Nardeep Singh Dahiya)
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