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Can a person convicted in cheque-dishonour proceedings return to the High Court years later and seek quashing of the original complaints under Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 (“CrPC”), after the ordinary challenge to the conviction has become time-barred?
The Delhi High Court confronted this question in Rajpal Naurang Yadav & Anr. v. M/s Murli Projects Pvt. Ltd. & Anr.1, a batch of twenty-one petitions arising from seven complaints under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881 (“NI Act”).[1]
The dispute began with the financing of the film Ata Pata Lapata. Murli Projects Private Limited advanced ₹5 crore to the film’s production company. The repayment obligation was revised through successive agreements, and post-dated cheques were issued. Seven cheques were subsequently dishonoured, leading to seven criminal complaints and the conviction of the petitioners in 2018. Their appeals were dismissed in January 2019.
The convictions were not challenged before the High Court within limitation. Revision petitions were eventually filed in 2024 with a delay of 1,894 days. Alongside those revisions, the petitioners invoked Section 482 CrPC to seek quashing of the complaints from which the convictions had arisen.
By then, the case was no longer principally about whether the cheques had been issued as security, whether the underlying transaction was an investment or a loan, or whether the parties had subsequently entered into a settlement. The larger legal issue was whether the High Court’s inherent jurisdiction could be used to reopen criminal proceedings that had already passed through trial and appeal, particularly when the statutory challenge to the conviction had been pursued after an extraordinary and unexplained delay.
Limits of Section 482 Post-Conviction
Section 482 CrPC preserves the inherent powers of the High Court to prevent abuse of the process of any court and to secure the ends of justice. Its present equivalent is Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023.
The provision exists because procedural law cannot anticipate every situation in which judicial intervention may be necessary. Yet the power is exceptional. It does not create another appellate or revisional forum, nor can it ordinarily be invoked to avoid the limitations attached to remedies specifically provided by the CrPC.
That distinction becomes particularly important once a Section 138 complaint has resulted in conviction.
At the pre-trial stage, a petition for quashing ordinarily asks whether the complaint, taken at face value, discloses the ingredients of an offence or whether continuation of the prosecution would itself amount to abuse of process. After conviction, however, the complaint has already been tested through evidence, cross-examination and judicial determination. The accused is no longer merely answering an allegation. A competent court has returned a finding of guilt, and that finding may also have been examined in appeal.
A petition seeking quashing of the original complaint at that stage cannot be viewed in isolation from the conviction that followed. In substance, quashing the complaint would erase the foundation of the conviction and provide another route to challenge an adjudication that has already attained finality.
The Delhi High Court found that this was effectively what the petitioners were attempting. Their revisions challenging the convictions had been filed after a delay of 1,894 days. The Court rejected the explanation that they believed their previous lawyers had already filed the appropriate challenge, noting their participation in several related proceedings and their awareness of the appellate judgment.
Once the delayed revisions failed, the Section 482 petitions could not become an alternative route to obtain substantially the same relief.
This does not mean that Section 482 becomes completely unavailable after conviction. The inherent power may still be exercised where the proceedings disclose a patent absence of jurisdiction, a fundamental legal impossibility, fraud upon the court or such manifest injustice that permitting the conviction to stand would itself amount to abuse of process.
But the threshold is materially different from ordinary appellate review.
The High Court is not expected, under Section 482, to reappreciate contractual documents, reconsider factual defences or determine whether another view of the evidence was possible. Those questions belong to trial, appeal and revision. Inherent jurisdiction is concerned with fundamental defects in the process, not with providing another opportunity to contest findings already reached through that process.
The petitioners nevertheless argued that the original complaints ought to be quashed because the cheques were issued only as security and because the parties had subsequently entered into a settlement involving fresh cheques. They relied on Gimpex Private Limited v. Manoj Goel2, where the Supreme Court considered successive prosecutions based first on original cheques and then on cheques issued under a settlement.
In Gimpex, the complainant had initiated prosecutions concerning both sets of cheques arising from the same liability. The Supreme Court held that after accepting the settlement and prosecuting the settlement cheques, the complainant could not continue parallel prosecutions based on the original cheques.
The Delhi High Court found that the present case was materially different. The fresh settlement cheques had not been presented and no second set of Section 138 complaints had been instituted. There were therefore no parallel prosecutions. More importantly, the settlement expressly preserved the existing complaints if the agreed payments were not made. Withdrawal of the complaints was conditional upon complete payment, and that condition was never fulfilled.
The settlement therefore did not extinguish the original complaints. Nor did the description of the instruments as security cheques, by itself, establish that the complaints were legally untenable.
A cheque issued as security is not automatically immune from Section 138. The relevant question is whether a legally enforceable liability existed when the cheque was presented. In the present case, the liability had been repeatedly acknowledged and restructured, and the issue had already been examined by the trial and appellate courts. Section 482 could not be used to undertake another factual examination merely because the petitioners continued to dispute the character of the cheques.
The decision therefore draws a line between two very different uses of inherent jurisdiction.
One is a genuine request to prevent a conviction founded upon proceedings that are fundamentally without legal authority.
The other is an attempt to repackage a delayed or exhausted challenge as a plea to secure the ends of justice.
Only the first falls within the exceptional purpose of Section 482.
Conclusion
The inherent jurisdiction of the High Court remains an important safeguard against injustice, but it is not a procedural reset mechanism.
Where Section 138 proceedings have culminated in conviction, the conviction has been affirmed in appeal and the subsequent revision has been filed after an extraordinary delay without sufficient cause, Section 482 CrPC cannot ordinarily be invoked to reopen the original complaint and secure indirectly what the delayed revision could not achieve directly.
The decisive question is not simply whether the accused can still raise an arguable defence. It is whether the proceedings suffer from a defect so fundamental that allowing them to stand would itself constitute an abuse of process or a miscarriage of justice.
A dispute over the interpretation of agreements, the character of security cheques or the effect of a conditional settlement does not ordinarily meet that threshold once those matters have already travelled through trial and appeal.
The Delhi High Court’s judgment therefore reinforces the distinction between correcting injustice and prolonging adjudication. Section 482 protects against the former. It cannot be employed to facilitate the latter.
Citations
Expositor(s): Adv. Jahnobi Paul
