Prabir Purkayastha v. State (NCT of Delhi) — 2024 INSC 414 · [2024] 6 SCR 666

Facts

Prabir Purkayastha challenged the Delhi High Court’s refusal to invalidate his arrest in a prosecution under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, 1967 and the initial order sending him to police custody, maintaining that the investigating agency had deprived him of liberty without giving the written grounds necessary to understand the arrest and that the remand proceedings had excluded effective assistance from the advocate whom he had engaged. The prosecution arose from a first information report registered on 17 August 2023 at the Special Cell police station in Delhi alleging offences under the special enactment together with provisions of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 concerning promotion of enmity and criminal conspiracy, following which the police searched the appellant’s residential and official premises and the premises associated with the company of which he was a director.

During those operations the police seized documents and digital devices belonging to the appellant, the company and other employees, arresting him on 3 October 2023 through a computerised memorandum which recorded the event and formal reasons for taking him into custody but did not supply an account of the individual grounds upon which his alleged involvement justified that deprivation of liberty. The memorandum placed the arrest at 5.45 in the afternoon on 3 October, while the initial order of the remand judge recorded 6 in the morning on 4 October as the time at which seven days of police custody were authorised, making the timing of communication and legal assistance central to the challenge rather than treating the sequence as an incidental administrative detail.

The appellant’s chosen advocate had attended the police station after the arrest and the investigating officer possessed that advocate’s telephone number, yet the appellant was produced at the judge’s residence before 6 the next morning in the presence of a remand advocate whom he had not engaged, with information reaching his relative and then his own advocate only later that morning. The call records considered by the Supreme Court showed information reaching the relative around 6.46 and the engaged advocate around 7, after the time written in the remand order, although later portions of that order referred to the advocate being contacted, receiving the application through a messaging service and being heard over the telephone.

The application for remand was transmitted to the engaged advocate after the order’s recorded time, while a copy of the first information report was supplied only on 5 October after an application for a certified copy had been allowed, leaving the communication of individual arrest grounds before the initial custody decision disputed throughout the subsequent proceedings. The appellant promptly approached the Delhi High Court for declarations that the arrest infringed his constitutional protections and that the remand was invalid because he had been deprived of consultation and defence through his chosen legal representative, seeking immediate release from the custody arising out of the August report rather than merely a declaration that an inconsequential procedural irregularity had occurred.

When the High Court dismissed that challenge on 13 October 2023, the appellant pursued the present appeal by special leave, in which the parties disputed the content and timing of information conveyed to him, the effect of the Supreme Court’s recent judgment in Pankaj Bansal and the significance of the remand order’s references to a hearing over the telephone. By the time the Supreme Court decided the appeal the investigation had been completed and a charge sheet filed, a development on which the State relied to resist release but which also informed the form of the ultimate direction after the Court concluded that the initial arrest and remand could not stand.

Issues

The foremost issue was whether an arrest under the special enactment could satisfy the requirement to inform the arrested person of the grounds where no written statement personal to that person had been provided before the police custody order, requiring the Court to distinguish meaningful information about the accusation from general reasons which could apply to any arrest. A connected issue concerned the relationship between Section 43B of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and the corresponding communication requirement within Section 19 of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002, because Pankaj Bansal had interpreted the latter provision and the State maintained that differences between the statutes prevented the same reasoning from governing this arrest.

The Court also had to examine whether the absence of an express requirement of writing in the constitutional text allowed oral communication to suffice, particularly in light of the State’s reliance on the language of Article 22 concerning preventive detention and the established interpretation of that protection in earlier decisions. The actual remand procedure raised a further question about whether contact with the appellant’s chosen advocate after the order’s recorded time could constitute an effective opportunity to oppose custody, together with whether the later references in the judicial record could displace the chronology established by the signature time and telephone records.

The State’s contention that Pankaj Bansal operated prospectively required consideration of the judgment’s delivery on 3 October, the appellant’s remand on 4 October and the asserted delay in uploading the earlier judgment, without assuming that the date on which an online copy appeared necessarily determined the binding force of a decision already pronounced. Finally the Court had to decide whether completion of investigation and filing of a charge sheet could cure the constitutional and statutory defects alleged in the initial arrest and remand, while keeping that procedural question separate from the factual merits of the offences which remained for the criminal court to examine.

Submissions

The appellant argued that the August report substantially repeated allegations from a 2020 economic offences investigation concerning foreign investment regulation and other asserted legal breaches, from which the Directorate of Enforcement had developed a money laundering investigation against the company and in which the Delhi High Court had earlier granted protection against coercive action. He maintained that the new report was founded on speculation rather than material supporting the alleged offences, alleging that the investigating authority had used it to circumvent the protection obtained in the earlier proceedings, although those contentions concerned the merits and alleged purpose of the prosecution rather than the communication defect which ultimately determined the appeal.

The appellant complained that neither an accessible online copy nor a copy supplied directly had informed him of the August report before arrest and remand, asserting that the certified report reached his advocate only on the evening of 5 October and that he had not been informed of the grounds orally or in writing before the loss of liberty. He relied upon Article 22 and Section 50 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 together with Pankaj Bansal, arguing that the requirement of written arrest grounds applied equally to the materially similar communication provision under the anti terrorism enactment and that successive remands could not validate an arrest which violated that safeguard at its inception.

Addressing the State’s prospective application objection, the appellant submitted that Pankaj Bansal had been pronounced on 3 October before the remand order of 4 October, so that even the later decision in Ram Kishor Arora describing the earlier judgment as prospective did not prevent reliance upon it in this chronology. The appellant also challenged the early morning presentation before the judge, alleging that the investigating officer bypassed the engaged advocate despite having already communicated with him at the police station and secured the presence of another advocate so that the custody request could be accepted before meaningful opposition became possible.

He referred to the time appended to the signed order and the later message to his advocate as showing that remand had already occurred before the application and asserted grounds were conveyed, contending that the references to telephone participation were later insertions which could not establish a hearing before the order was made. In further submissions concerning the underlying accusation, the appellant disputed the references to an allegedly incorrect map of India and to farmers’ protests, maintaining that no such map had been made, published or found in his possession and that the report did not identify incidents connecting him to the offences, while requesting that the arrest and remand be quashed and custody ended.

The State opposed the appeal by relying upon the prospective understanding of Pankaj Bansal and asserting that its online publication occurred only late on 4 October, contending that the investigating officer could not be expected to follow the written communication direction before the judgment had been uploaded and brought into the public domain. It also referred to the appellant’s pleadings in the High Court as suggesting that remand occurred after 7 in the morning, arguing that this account undermined his reliance upon the earlier recorded time and supported the position that information had reached his advocate before the judicial custody decision was completed.

The State maintained that neither the arrest clause nor the preventive detention clause of Article 22 expressly required written grounds, while distinguishing the overall language of the money laundering and anti terrorism provisions to resist extension of the earlier statutory interpretation to the present case. Concerning legal assistance it argued that information given to the appellant’s relative reached the engaged advocate, who transmitted a written objection through a police official and whose opposition was noted in the remand order, claiming that the constitutional right to consultation and defence had therefore been honoured despite his absence from the judge’s residence.

The State further relied upon the ordinary presumption of correctness attaching to judicial acts, contending that the record of consultation and conveyance should not be doubted, while maintaining that any defect in arrest or the original remand had been cured by the subsequent completion of investigation and filing of the charge sheet. In reply the appellant maintained that the communication clauses were materially identical and that the signed time within the judicial record contradicted the State’s chronology, arguing that a presumption supporting the record could not reasonably be invoked to ignore its own recorded time while accepting later references to participation which occurred only after that time.

Reasoning

The Court first examined the statutory comparison because the State’s objection, if accepted, would prevent the reasoning in Pankaj Bansal from supplying the applicable communication standard, requiring attention to the particular safeguard in dispute instead of treating every difference elsewhere in the two enactments as decisive. Section 19 of the money laundering enactment authorised arrest upon the specified recorded belief and required the officer to inform the person of the grounds as soon as possible, while Section 43B of the anti terrorism enactment placed the same communication obligation upon an officer who arrested under Section 43A, with Section 43C permitting compatible provisions of the procedural Code to govern arrests, searches and seizures.

Although the surrounding powers and investigative machinery differed, the words governing communication of arrest grounds were materially the same and both implemented Article 22, making the relevant comparison one of the constitutional protection being carried into each statute rather than a claim that the two special enactments had identical operation in every respect. The Court therefore rejected the attempt to derive a different communication standard from variations in the broader arrest schemes, explaining that provisions which implemented the same important constitutional safeguard required a consistent interpretation where no material difference in the communication obligation justified reducing the protection in one class of arrest.

The compatible application of the remand provisions also supported that approach, because judicial supervision after arrest operated within both special frameworks and the arrested person needed effective knowledge of the grounds in order to oppose the authority’s request for custodial interrogation and pursue release before the competent court. The Court adopted the relevant explanation in Pankaj Bansal that information must be meaningful in light of its purpose, under which the person could not effectively obtain advice or address the conditions of release while remaining unaware of the particular facts upon which the arresting authority relied to deprive that person of liberty.

In recalling the earlier money laundering decision, the Court explained that the demanding bail conditions under that enactment illustrated the importance of knowing the officer’s grounds, although the application of the communication principle here did not depend upon transferring those particular bail conditions into the different statutory regime governing the appellant’s prosecution. The adopted reasoning concerning written supply also addressed the risk of a factual dispute about oral communication, because an authority’s claim to have read the grounds could leave the court confronted with opposing assertions while a written statement provided under acknowledgment offered an identifiable record through which the constitutional obligation could be verified.

The Court further recognised the practical difficulty of retaining information heard or read at the time of arrest, particularly when the grounds might be extensive and the person’s distress prevented accurate recollection, so that a document left with the person served an ongoing function which an opportunity to hear the officer speak could not reliably perform. This explanation connected the form of communication with its remedial use rather than with a preference for paperwork, since the information had to remain available for consultation, opposition to police custody and preparation of a bail request instead of disappearing once the arresting officer had completed a recital.

The right was not confined to a particular investigative agency because Article 22 protected the person whose liberty was curtailed, which led the Court to express the written grounds requirement for persons arrested under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act and more broadly for persons arrested for offences, subject to the constitutional and statutory setting of the arrest before it. The Court emphasised the protection of liberty under the constitutional provisions and relied upon Roy V. D. v. State of Kerala for the proposition that life and personal liberty could be interfered with only through lawful authority, recognising that Article 21 protected persons beyond the class of citizens while treating compliance with arrest safeguards as part of lawful deprivation rather than a matter of discretionary courtesy.

From that constitutional foundation it followed that infringement of the right to grounds affected the validity of arrest and remand, which meant that completion of investigation did not retrospectively convert the earlier unconstitutional exercise into a valid one merely because the prosecution had reached a later procedural stage. The charge sheet therefore could not perform the curative function asserted by the State, since the question concerned whether the appellant had been lawfully arrested and given a genuine opportunity to challenge custody when the initial judicial order was sought, rather than whether sufficient material had subsequently been assembled to place allegations before a trial court.

The State’s reliance upon Article 22 concerning preventive detention prompted the Court to examine the established construction of that provision, under which the absence of the word writing in the constitutional text had not been treated as permission to give only an oral explanation of the basis of detention. Harikisan v. State of Maharashtra explained that communication had to impart knowledge sufficient for an effective representation, with delivery of documents in a form the detained person could not understand failing to meet the purpose and an oral translation of detailed grounds not supplying an adequate substitute for usable written information.

The significance of that authority was the relationship between knowledge and remedy, because the person needed to understand the basic circumstances attributed to him before being capable of challenging the order, which made comprehension and retained information part of communication rather than consequences the authority could leave to chance. Lallubhai Jogibhai Patel v. Union of India reinforced the requirement that the grounds be communicated in writing in a language understood by the person, explaining that verbal explanation without leaving written information defeated the opportunity for a purposeful representation and therefore infringed the constitutional safeguard.

Those preventive detention decisions did not turn the appellant’s prosecution into preventive detention, but their interpretation of communication demonstrated why the State could not rely upon the constitutional text’s silence about writing to deny an equivalent meaningful protection in arrest proceedings founded upon Article 22. The Court accordingly treated the constitutional purpose underlying both clauses as supporting written communication, rejecting the argument that the specific word used in one context allowed an authority in the other to leave the affected person without a retained statement of the grounds which would enable an effective legal response.

The judgment placed particular importance on the earliest effective supply because advice and opposition to remand were needed before the authority secured further custody, which made delayed transmission after the initial order inadequate to fulfil the function that the information should have performed during that decision. Turning to the documentary record, the Court found that the first information report had not been uploaded or supplied to the appellant before remand despite a request on his behalf, while the certified copy reached the advocate only on 5 October, which contradicted any suggestion that its contents had already provided the appellant with an effective account of the grounds before the initial loss of liberty was judicially continued.

That finding did not establish a universal requirement that every first information report must itself serve as the arrest grounds, because the Court subsequently distinguished the initiation document from the individual grounds needed for custody, but it showed the absence of an alternative timely communication on the facts of this case. The arrest memorandum was equally insufficient because its relevant column listed general reasons for arrest rather than the facts connecting this appellant to the alleged wrongdoing, with its standard form describing objectives such as ensuring investigation, preventing evidence interference or securing attendance instead of specifying why this person’s conduct gave rise to the particular arrest.

A stated desire to prevent further offending could explain a general preventive purpose of custody without disclosing the actual accusation, just as an assertion that interrogation was needed could describe an investigative objective without identifying the material upon which the officer believed the particular person should be arrested. Likewise general apprehensions about disappearance of evidence, inducement of witnesses or inability to secure attendance did not communicate the circumstances personal to the appellant merely because those concerns appeared in a signed memorandum, which required the Court to distinguish the administrative completeness of a form from the substantive sufficiency of information.

The distinction between reasons and grounds was therefore central to the reasoning, with the former describing formal considerations commonly capable of applying to accused persons while the latter needed to provide the particular basic facts and material circumstances which led the officer to arrest this accused and which the accused could address in challenging remand. The Court did not suggest that the investigating officer could never consider the general purposes listed in the memorandum, but those considerations could not displace the separate obligation to tell the arrested person the specific factual foundation upon which the power was exercised in his case.

The High Court’s acceptance that written information was present in the memorandum failed on that distinction, because the document did not contain the individual grounds notwithstanding its description of formal reasons, while the State’s representative before the Supreme Court did not maintain the defence on the basis that the memorandum itself supplied those grounds. The Court next examined when the engaged advocate could participate, taking the time recorded by the remand judge as the controlling documentary fact against which the subsequent calls and transmission had to be assessed, rather than using a disputed description in the appellant’s earlier pleadings to displace the signed order’s own stated time.

The arrest at 5.45 the previous afternoon left a substantial period within the ordinary twenty four hour requirement for judicial production, which the Court considered in assessing why the investigating officer had presented the appellant before 6 the next morning despite knowing that an advocate had already been engaged and having the means to contact him. Section 43C permitted the relevant provisions of the Code to apply, including the rules connecting prompt production with remand under Section 167, but the requirement of timely production did not explain excluding the chosen advocate when the officer could have communicated the proposed custody hearing within the available period.

The Court’s criticism was therefore grounded in the combination of available time, known representation and the unexplained early presentation, rather than in a categorical rule that a judicial officer could never consider a custody request at a residence or outside ordinary working hours. The presence of a different remand advocate could not answer the denial of participation to the person actually chosen by the appellant, particularly when the appellant objected to that representation and the subsequent attempt to make contact occurred only after the remand order had been signed at the recorded time.

The constitutional entitlement included consultation and defence through a legal practitioner of choice, which could not be reduced to the fact that some advocate was physically present when the authorities already knew of an engaged representative who could have received notice and the grounds needed to oppose the request. The telephone records showed information first passing to the relative at approximately 6.46 and reaching the engaged advocate around 7, making it impossible on that chronology for the advocate to have examined the application and effectively opposed remand before the order recorded at 6 had already been made.

Transmission of the remand application through the messaging service therefore supplied information too late for the immediate task, because the opportunity to oppose investigative custody could not be restored merely by allowing comments after the officer had obtained the requested order and the appellant had been committed to that custody. The Court rejected the State’s argument based upon inconsistent pleading descriptions of the time, finding the actual judicial record decisive to that question, which also prevented the presumption associated with judicial acts from being used selectively to credit a hearing recital while disregarding the time to which that same record committed the order.

The appearance of the later references in a finer script supported the Court’s conclusion that those references had been inserted afterwards, although it expressly allowed the possibility that the judge had subsequently heard the advocate without harmful intention, thereby separating the defect of timing from an unnecessary finding of personal dishonesty by the judicial officer. That qualification mattered because the legal conclusion did not require proof that the judge deliberately fabricated the proceeding, since even an honestly recorded subsequent conversation could not transform participation after the signed order into the prior opportunity needed to inform and contest that order.

The State’s reliance upon a transmitted written objection similarly did not resolve the timing problem, since a representation made after the custody decision had already been completed could not perform the same protective function as a submission considered while the application remained open for adjudication. The Court thus identified an ineffective subsequent hearing rather than denying that any communication occurred at all, preserving the facts concerning later contact while finding that those facts failed to establish the constitutionally required opportunity at the point when the remand decision was taken.

When the State characterised the remand application as a complete statement of the arrest grounds, the Court declined to assess its substantive allegations in a way which might prejudice trial, instead deciding the communication issue on the established fact that the application had not been provided to the appellant or his advocate before the order. It briefly observed that the purported grounds largely recounted the first information report without identifying particular incidents, but immediately recognised that such a report need not contain every detail because its role was to initiate the criminal process and the investigating officer could collect material for a charge sheet through further investigation.

That explanation preserved the difference between a document whose permissible function was to start inquiry and the requirement of personal grounds when liberty was actually taken, preventing the decision from turning a deficiency in detail at the initiating stage into an automatic conclusion that every alleged offence lacked legal or factual foundation. The appellant’s arguments about the proposed map and the farmers’ agitation were therefore not resolved as findings concerning guilt or innocence, because assessing whether those allegations established the statutory offences would enter the merits reserved for the court examining the prosecution after the charge sheet had been filed.

The decision’s procedural restraint also prevented an opposite inference that rejecting the arrest validated those accusations, since the Court removed the custody foundation while leaving the prosecution court to examine the alleged conduct and relevant evidence without treating the appeal’s observations as a merits determination. The Court then addressed the prospective application argument by returning to the dates which were not disputed, namely delivery of Pankaj Bansal on 3 October and the initial police remand on 4 October, so that describing the earlier judgment as prospective did not logically exclude application to a custody decision which followed its pronouncement.

The asserted late uploading was treated as conjectural and insufficient to postpone the binding effect of an interpretation already declared, with Article 141 giving that interpretation force as law throughout the country rather than leaving each authority free to condition observance upon when it obtained an online copy. The Court did not need to decide an alternative chronology in which arrest and remand had both preceded the earlier decision, because the actual sequence placed the challenged remand after it, which confined the response to the State’s timing objection to the circumstances requiring determination in these appeals.

The reasoning concerning written grounds was also independently supported by the constitutional interpretation and preventive detention authorities, so that the judgment’s protection did not rest upon a mere similarity in offence labels or an assumption that the officer should have guessed an unpublished administrative practice. Upon that analysis the absence of individual written grounds before the custody order infringed the communication safeguard, while the late attempt to reach the engaged advocate failed to supply effective opposition to remand, making the arrest and ensuing initial custody legally unsustainable despite the gravity of the statutory offences invoked.

The later charge sheet could not restore the lost constitutional opportunity or retroactively authorise the invalid arrest, although it required the Court to consider how release should operate in an ongoing criminal proceeding, which explained the ultimate requirement of bonds without converting the release direction into approval of the challenged custody. The statutory provisions reproduced in the judgment also showed that Section 43A contemplated action by an empowered officer upon the specified knowledge or belief derived through the forms of information and material which it described, while Section 43B required forwarding the arrested person without unnecessary delay and Section 43C preserved compatible procedural supervision, making the communication protection part of an arrest framework rather than an isolated courtesy disconnected from the authority’s other duties.

Section 19 of the money laundering enactment contained its own forwarding obligation to the Adjudicating Authority and production requirement, which differed from the institutional arrangements in the other statute but did not change the common requirement to inform the person of the grounds, so that recognising distinct mechanisms did not justify treating equivalent language as carrying a weaker safeguard when the investigating institution changed. This method of comparison avoided both extremes presented by the dispute, neither declaring the statutes interchangeable nor permitting their general differences to defeat a specifically shared protection, because the relevant interpretive task concerned the clause through which the fundamental right was implemented and the practical use which the person needed to make of the information.

The earlier decision’s discussion of confidential investigative material also remained part of the reasoning adopted by the Court, recognising that personal grounds ordinarily could be supplied without disclosure of the entire investigation and that genuinely sensitive portions could be protected through suitable editing, which answered a concern about disclosure without turning confidentiality into a reason to leave the arrested person ignorant of the basic case against him. That distinction was especially relevant where numerous documents and digital devices had been seized, because the act of supplying grounds did not require the investigating agency to hand over every seized record before it could proceed, whereas identifying the personal foundation of arrest remained necessary despite the existence of a larger body of material requiring examination.

The Court’s reliance upon constitutional protection meant that the allegations’ statutory seriousness did not reduce the standard of information, since the person accused under a stringent enactment still needed to know what conduct was attributed to him and could not be expected to oppose custody by answering general statements about proper investigation or potential interference. The pending possibility of a bail application illustrated why a usable record mattered beyond the few minutes of the remand hearing, because consultation could require comparing alleged events with the person’s own explanation or identifying factual mistakes which could not be addressed reliably when the officer supplied only a fleeting oral account.

The same need explained why receiving the report on 5 October did not undo the earlier breach, since access on a later date could assist subsequent proceedings but could not recreate the lost opportunity to use the information before seven days of police custody had been authorised through the first order. The hearing problem also concerned more than whether the advocate could physically reach the judge’s residence after notification, because a legally meaningful opportunity required time to obtain the information, consult the arrested person and formulate opposition before the decision, whereas the actual chronology placed notification after the court had already signed the custody order.

The record therefore did not require the Court to construct a hypothetical minimum period of notice applicable to every remand, since the demonstrated sequence established a more direct defect through the complete absence of prior communication to the engaged representative and the provision of the application only after the judicial act it was intended to inform. The presumption of regularity could not be used to resolve that defect through abstraction because the Court had before it the recorded time, call information and appearance of the inserted passages, all of which had to be evaluated together rather than displaced by an assumption that any recital of hearing necessarily proved an opportunity before the decision.

Equally the Court’s allowance for an innocent explanation of the judge’s later writing prevented the assessment from depending upon the appellant’s most serious accusation of manipulation, since procedural invalidity could follow from a sequence which failed to provide a timely hearing even if the subsequent addition accurately described a later conversation. The restrained treatment of the remand application’s allegations preserved the criminal court’s role after investigation, recognising that the appellant’s claim that the case was fictional and the State’s claim that the case was serious were opposing positions which could not be converted into findings merely because the arrest question required the Supreme Court to inspect some prosecution documents.

The Court’s decision thus rested upon independently verifiable custody facts rather than an assessment of the disputed geopolitical or financial narrative, with the time at which grounds and legal assistance became available supplying the basis for relief while leaving the weight and legal effect of the collected material to the proceedings in which those questions properly arose. The bonds directed at release likewise remained conceptually separate from the grounds upon which the appeal succeeded, because a requirement securing participation in the prosecution did not establish that the earlier arrest was permissible and did not impose upon the appellant a retrospective duty to justify release from an arrest which the Court had declared invalid. The resulting distinction between the ongoing case and the invalid custody process allowed the judgment to protect liberty without extinguishing a prosecution it had not examined on the merits, which preserved both the constitutional remedy for the identified violation and the authority of the trial court to determine the charges through lawful proceedings.

Decision

The Supreme Court allowed the appeal, declaring the appellant’s arrest, the remand order of 4 October 2023 and the Delhi High Court’s order of 13 October invalid before quashing and setting them aside, with the absence of timely written grounds and effective participation forming the foundation for the relief. Although the Court considered that release without security could otherwise have followed from those defects, it directed release upon furnishing bail and bonds to the satisfaction of the trial court because the charge sheet had already been filed, thereby combining correction of the invalid custody with an attendance arrangement appropriate to the continuing prosecution.

The direction did not uphold the State’s argument that filing the charge sheet cured the arrest, since the Court had rejected that proposition and invalidated the custody orders, while the bond requirement addressed the manner of release after that invalidation rather than providing a retrospective basis for the initial deprivation of liberty. The Court expressly stated that none of its observations should be treated as commenting upon the merits, leaving allegations concerning the company, foreign connections, the purported map and other conduct for the competent criminal court instead of deciding them through the arrest challenge. Pending applications were disposed of with the appeal, the decision therefore securing relief from unlawful custody while preserving the distinction between an enforceable constitutional safeguard and the separate adjudication of whether the prosecution could prove the charged offences.

Source: Prabir Purkayastha v. State (NCT of Delhi) · 2024 INSC 414 · [2024] 6 SCR 666