Chandigrh : Local court of Chief Judicial Magistrate Chandigarh has dismissed the complaint filed by Munish Madhav Prasher against Sh Rakesh Agrawal Regional Passport Officer Chandigarh finding it to be false. On 11th February the court has called for the report in this matter from SHO of sector 34 police station.
The court observed that after going through the complaint at length, it becomes very obvious that complaint is more in the nature of petition for redressal of some personal grudge against the named accused, rather than disclosure of some allegations of cognizable offence warranting
registration of case and investigation. Court observed that how the destruction of file can be considered to be an offence of cheating punishable under Section 420 IPC or fraudulent removal or concealment of property for the purpose of section 424 IPC. The judgement mentioned that This Court also fails to understand how destruction of record keeping scanned copies of the same should be considered to be causing disappearance of evidence of offence for the purpose of section 201 IPC. Documents on record placed with the complaint establish that the named accused as Regional Passport Officer, Chandigarh was acting in discharge of his duties as an authority under the Passport Act and Section 16 of the Passport Act 1967 and Section 16 of the Public Records Act 1993 protects the acts of authority and for the said acts, the Court cannot form an opinion of cognizable offence requiring registration of a case and dismissed the complaint.
It may be recalled that Munish Madhav Prasher has approached the court for registration of FIR after he was issued notices from passport office with the allegations that his physical file has been wrongly destroyed. He also made number of complaints to higher authorities in the Ministry of External Affairs, New Delhi and all his complaints have been found to be false after enquiry by the Ministry. Ministry has already denied him the prosecution sanction because his complaints were devoid of any truth. His complaint regarding wrong destruction of record has also been found false by the Ministry and the Ministry has found no deviation from procedure prescribed in weeding out of old record as the same is always available in digital form.