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Showing contexts for: Forgery of document in Bacchan Singh vs State Of M.P. on 28 August, 2015Matching Fragments
8. It is undisputed that, against the petitioner, Court has not filed a private complaint, but by order of the Court Reader Krishna Veer Singh has made a complaint to the Police Station Kotwali against the petitioner for initiating the proceedings for furnishing the forged surety. It is also undisputed that such forged surety bond was prepared much before and out of the Court.
9. It is undisputed that if forgery has been committed while the document was in the custody of a Court, then prosecution can be launched only with a complaint made by that Court. Again, if forgery was committed with a document which has not been produced in a court, then the prosecution would lie at the instance of any person.
10. The scope of the preliminary enquiry envisaged in Section 340(1) is to ascertain whether any offence affecting administration of justice has been committed in respect of a document produced in Court or given in evidence in a proceeding in that Court. So the offences envisaged in Section 195(1)(b) must involve acts which would have affected the administration of justice. The offence should have been committed during the time when the document was in custodia legis.
11. It would be a strained thinking that any offence involving forgery of a document if committed far outside the purlieus of the Court and long before its production in the Court, could also be treated as one affecting administration of justice merely because that document later reached the court records. It must therefore be held that the bar contained in Section 195(1)(b)(ii) of the Code is not applicable to a case where forgery of the document was committed before the document was produced in a Court.
12. The sequitur of the above discussion is that the bar contained in Section 195(1)(b)(ii) of the Code is not applicable to a case where forgery of the document was committed before the document was produced in a Court.
13. In the present case, according to the case of the prosecution, the surety bond had been forged earlier and thereafter the same was filed in the Court. It is nobody's case that any offence as enumerated in Section 195(b)(ii) of the Code was committed in respect to the said forged surety bond after it had been produced or filed in the Court. Therefore, the bar created by Section 195(1)(b)(ii) of the Code would not come into play and there is no embargo on the power of the Court to send written report to Police Station for taking cognizance against petitioner.