Supreme Court sends former Delhi Mayor to local police over UP raid plea

The Supreme Court on Tuesday declined to entertain a petition filed by former Delhi Mayor Farhad Suri seeking the registration of an FIR against police officers who carried out an alleged midnight operation at his Nizamuddin East residence in the national capital.

A three-judge Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant directed the petitioner, represented by advocate Anoop Prakash Awasthi, to take his grievance to the jurisdictional police station for relief under the relevant provision of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. The Bench observed that the competent police authorities would act strictly in accordance with law.

The court also turned down the petitioner's request that it lay down guidelines to prevent a recurrence of what he described as an arbitrary exercise of police power.

State's account

Uttar Pradesh submitted during the hearing that Mr. Suri was being hypersensitive. According to the State, the Ghaziabad Police was acting on a warrant and traced the person it was seeking to a tower within about 200 yards of the petitioner's premises. The team, it said, followed procedure, was accompanied by two officers from the Nizamuddin East Police Station and rang the doorbell; it left after being told the suspect was not there. The State counsel argued that entertaining the petition would open the floodgates, and that a statutory mechanism already exists which everyone must follow.

Petitioner's version

Mr. Awasthi contended that an unusually large contingent of Ghaziabad Police reached the residential colony in a convoy of 15 to 16 vehicles at about 12.45 a.m. on the intervening night of August 22-23. In his petition, Mr. Suri said the operation was conducted in a high-handed, unauthorised and intimidating manner, that some members of the party were in plain clothes and that no search warrant was produced.

He stated that the police team told him it had information that an accused in a double-murder case at Indirapuram in Uttar Pradesh was hiding on his premises. When he sought to verify the authority and warrant for the proposed search, the petition says, the party failed to furnish any document or a satisfactory explanation. On contacting the Station House Officer of Hazrat Nizamuddin police station, he was told that the local police had only been informed of the UP team's visit to Hazrat Nizamuddin Railway Station and had no knowledge of the particular premises to be searched.

The petition adds that Mr. Suri later learnt the UP Police party had purportedly come in connection with FIR No. 678/2026 of Indirapuram police station, concerning independent journalist Abhishek Upadhyay, and not a double-murder case as stated by the officer leading the operation. Mr. Upadhyay, who flagged alleged misappropriations in Ram Temple donations and against whom the Ghaziabad Police lodged a road-rage FIR, is already under interim protection from the Supreme Court against coercive action.

The petition argued that the scale and manner of the operation, along with an apparent disregard for safeguards governing inter-State police action, amounted to a concerted abuse of authority intended to overawe and coerce the petitioner, threatening his life, liberty, dignity and constitutional rights. Mr. Awasthi framed the matter as raising a larger constitutional question: whether a police force of one State may enter another State's territorial jurisdiction and attempt a search of a citizen's residence at midnight without adhering to legal safeguards.