CHENNAI: The Madras High Court has said that public interest litigation (PIL) petitions cannot be permitted if they are filed for settling personal scores.
The first bench of Chief Justice Manindra Mohan Shrivastava and Justice G Arul Murugan made the remarks while dismissing a PIL filed by a person seeking to issue directions to take action against an additional public prosecutor and a police inspector “for providing false information” to the court in a criminal case.
“The concept of ‘public interest litigation’ was evolved predominantly to enable persons to espouse the cause of others, that too, when the persons aggrieved are unable to approach the court directly by reasons of abject poverty or lack of means or being socially disadvantaged and backward. Such an august forum cannot be allowed to be reduced to an arena for settling private scores,” the bench said in a recent order.
The PIL was filed by Aditya Singh of Delhi. He sought the court to order action against additional public prosecutor Sugendran and the inspector of Pallikaranai police station “for making a false submission in the court about filing a charge sheet in an FIR registered against him”.
He said the court dismissed his petition to quash an FIR registered against him on the complaint of Sankar Dayalan of Chennai regarding a money transaction dispute. However, when he sought the court’s registry for a copy of the charge sheet, he was told no such charge sheet was filed.
And so, he filed the PIL seeking a direction to the authorities concerned to take action against the additional public prosecutor and the inspector.
The bench said if the petitioner is aggrieved, he does have an effective remedy under provisions of the BNSS; without availing it, invoking the extraordinary jurisdiction of the court, that too by filing a PIL, is “utterly misconceived”.
