Last year it has been noticed that number of fake cases are increasing in Rajasthan, it has seen that Jaipur police had found over 4206 fake cases within one year. They have found that 4,206 cases were reported in Jaipur between 2015-16. In most cases, a false complaint was filed with an aim to grab money or defame a person. These fake cases included allegations of molestation, cheating, harassment for dowry and rape.
Which case are identified to be fake from point of view of police?: A B-Final report filed after investigation instead of charge-sheet to court for the further trial of accused. Basically, the case gets closed after investigation due to it being considered non-worthy for trial, or outright fake. The report is filed as per agenda underCrPC 173.
4206 fake cases are huge for a single city in a single year. The reason seems to be aggressive approach of Rajasthan police in registering the case.
A senior official said that filing FIR in Rajasthan is not at all a difficult procedure unlike in other states like Uttar Pradesh and Bihar. “Rajasthan police immediately registers the FIR in cases related to molestation, rape, sexual harassment, and dowry demand. Even though it is a good step but during the subsequent investigation, it was found that allegations were made merely to implicate a person in cases in order to grab money,” police said.
Being aggressive in registering FIR is not a bad thing, provided police is proactive in prosecuting those who file these false cases, too. Due to such large number of fake case police has been directed to prosecute the complainants under IPC 182.
False information, with aim to cause public servant to use his legal power to the injury of another person is a punishable offense.
To omit or do anything which such public servant considered not to do or omit if the true state of facts respecting which such information is given were known by him or else to use the legal power of such public servant to the injury or annoyance of any person shall be punished with imprisonment of either description for a term which may extend to six months, or with fine which may extend to one thousand rupees, or with both under IPC 182.
Zero tolerance for false Cases
Since the various government agencies including law enforcement, corporate etc are from time to time stating about their “zero tolerance for crimes against women, sexual harassment, domestic violence” and so on;
State police all around India will be filing more and more FIRs based on complaints rather than turning people away. That is how police in a democratic country are supposed to work and it should attain that level over a period of time or we will remain a democratic country just in name. Let’s go with the optimistic scenario. Filing of FIRs is the stated goal of Supreme Court, high courts, politicians, polices them, which is already happening to a large extent in crimes against women cases at least. The workload on police will increase.
As many people want to take advantage of leniency in false case prosecution, they will file fake cases for purpose of extorting money and humiliating someone.
This false case will ultimately increase the workload on. Since they are spending their time and effort in investigating these false cases, thereby reducing time and effort from pursuing other duties.
As of now the broad of police says that “our job is to file FIRs”, and let the truth be found in the criminal court trial. That leads to low assurance rate, and again some blame is put on police, but as of now there is no major confusion in public since most Indian government agencies are adept in the art of finger pointing the , to some other department, and the public is also used to all those excuses. The SC has already issued some advisory on putting an onus on police for low assurance rates that will be part of a separate article about zero tolerance for false case.
It is in the interest of the public to let all complaints be taken as FIR, and then the false ones are pulled out as B final reports. The ones which get to charge-sheet and then the trial, should have high conviction rates. The high conviction rates shouldn’t be secured by convicting all the poor/illiterate accused without a good defence lawyer, but that is a separate topic by itself.
In order to avoid wasting time and effort as well escape from bad publicity, police will be forced to prosecute false cases in future. Because if they create a charge-sheet instead of B final report, it will lead to lower conviction rates due to BOTH false cases leading to zero conviction, and even true cases leading to low conviction because police had wasted time and effort on investigating false cases and creating dubious charge-sheets, so the quality of investigation on true complaints will be poor. These poor quality charge-sheets will not stand in court.
So if police will be forced to prosecute false cases in future, then it is the duty of the public to bring that future forward as soon as possible.
Send RTI to police about false cases and number of prosecutions under IPC 182
The simple way this process can be brought about in all States’ police of local police station, or PIO of city, region police departments asking about number of false final reports, and also how many of these were prosecuted under IPC 182
To find PIO to which RTI has to be sent, one can try a google search with “ police RTI”, and doing that one can often get the direct link to RTI and PIO related information of the city’s police. E.g. following page is the first result for “Bangalore police RTI”
