The bench of Justices Sanjay Kishan Kaul, Abhay S. Oka, and Vikram Nath stated, "Any order or judgement delivered by this Court becomes a reportable exercise to produce higher volumes of reported cases." The court further stated that this contributes to considerable misunderstanding regarding prevailing legal doctrines.
In the instant case titled State of Punjab vs Jasbir Singh, the two judges bench referred to the following issues:
i) Does Section 340 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 require a preliminary investigation and an opportunity for the potential accuser to be heard before a Court files a complaint under Section 195 of the Code?
ii) What is the scope and ambit of such preliminary inquiry?
The Supreme Court said that the factual situation in question involves an order, and the ruling establishes legal rules.
The bench had detected a discrepancy between the positions adopted by the judgments of two and three judges at the time. In Pritish v. State of Maharashtra & Ors (2002) 1 SCC 253, it was decided that while the court is not required to conduct a preliminary investigation into a complaint, if it chooses to do so, it should compile a complete set of the facts that would be useful in determining whether the offence should be looked into further.
Whereas, in Sharad Pawar v. Jagmohan Dalmiya (2010) 15 SCC 290, it was said that it is important to undertake a preliminary investigation as provided for in Section 340 of the Criminal Procedure Code and also to provide the defendants with an opportunity to be heard.
The bench stated in its response to the reference that the information presented in Sharad Pawar's case is just an order, not a decision. The judge stated:
“An order is in the given factual scenario. The judgment lays down the principles of law. The scenario is that any order or judgment passed by this Court becomes a reportable exercise to create more volumes of reported cases! This thus has a possibility at times of causing some confusion on the legal principles prevalent. The observations in the quoted paragraph extracted aforesaid apparently came out of the flow of the order rather than pronouncing any principles of law and that is why the Bench itself categorized what is observed as an order i.e, in the given factual scenario."
In response to the reference, the bench stated that the law as stated by the Constitution Bench in Iqbal Singh Marwah vs. Meenakshi Marwah (2005) 4 SCC 370 is consistent with the findings in Pritish's case (supra).