Ashwinkumar Sanap v. State of Maharashtra: a zombie Section 66A FIR quashed

The facts in brief

An FIR was registered against the applicant, Ashwinkumar Pandhari Sanap, in Maharashtra. It invoked Section 500 of the Indian Penal Code — criminal defamation — together with Sections 66A and 66B of the Information Technology Act 2000. Section 66A is the provision that penalised "offensive" electronic messages, struck down as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court nearly a decade earlier in Shreya Singhal v. Union of India (2015). Section 66B penalises the dishonest receipt of a stolen computer resource or communication device.

The applicant approached the Aurangabad Bench of the Bombay High Court for quashing. His case was that an FIR could not lawfully rest on a provision that no longer exists in the statute book; that Section 66B had no application on the facts; and that the defamation allegation did not disclose an offence.

A Division Bench of Justice Vibha Kankanwadi and Justice S.G. Chapalgaonkar examined the FIR and the invoked provisions, and on 7 November 2024 allowed the criminal application and quashed the FIR.

The question

The questions were narrow and, on the law, not seriously contestable. Could an FIR be founded on Section 66A after that provision had been struck down as unconstitutional? Did the ingredients of Section 66B arise on the facts pleaded? And could the residual Section 500 IPC defamation allegation independently sustain the FIR once the IT Act limbs were removed?

Behind the narrow questions lay a systemic one that the Court did not shy from: why FIRs continue to be registered under a provision that has been void for nearly a decade.

The persistence is not for want of authority telling the police to stop. Shreya Singhal was decided in 2015, and in the years since the Supreme Court has issued follow-up directions, in the PUCL proceedings, requiring States to cease registering cases under Section 66A and to withdraw those still pending. Advisories have travelled down through Chief Secretaries and Directors General of Police. Despite all of it, the provision keeps reappearing in first information reports — frequently, as here, bolted onto other charges to lend a complaint a cyber-offence dimension it would not otherwise have. The Aurangabad Bench was therefore not breaking new doctrinal ground so much as confronting, once again, a settled rule that the enforcement machinery had failed to absorb.

What the Court held

The Division Bench quashed the FIR, addressing each limb in turn.

On Section 66A, the Court reiterated that the provision was struck down in Shreya Singhal and is therefore void and non-existent in law. A struck-down penal provision cannot be the basis of any prosecution. The Court then recorded its disapproval of the fact that, despite the declaration of unconstitutionality, cases continue to be registered under the section.

The continued invocation of a struck-down penal provision was not treated as a clerical lapse. The Court characterised it as a failure of the police to heed binding precedent.

On Section 66B, the Court found that the ingredients did not arise on the facts pleaded. The provision requires the dishonest receipt of a stolen computer resource or communication device; on the material before the Court there was no stolen resource or device dishonestly received, so the charge could not stand. With the two IT Act limbs gone, the residual Section 500 IPC defamation allegation could not independently sustain the FIR on the material. The Court exercised its inherent jurisdiction under Section 482 CrPC and quashed the FIR in its entirety.

The doctrinal architecture

The judgment is short, but it crystallises four propositions that recur across the long afterlife of Section 66A.

The foundational proposition is that a struck-down penal provision is void ab initio. After Shreya Singhal, no FIR, charge or prosecution can be founded on Section 66A; registration under it is illegal per se. The provision did not merely become unenforceable going forward — it ceased to exist as law, so any case built on it is void from the start.

The second is police accountability for invoking a void law. The Court's "high-handedness in utter disregard" language is more than rhetorical disapproval; it is a citable rebuke that supports relief, and arguments for cost and accountability, wherever Section 66A is still being deployed. It frames continued registration as a disciplinary failure rather than an innocent mistake.

The third is that Section 66B is narrow. It requires the dishonest receipt of a stolen computer resource or communication device and cannot serve as a catch-all substitute for the struck-down Section 66A. The case illustrates a recurring over-reach in which police pad a 66A FIR with 66B to give it the appearance of a surviving cyber-offence; the Court refused to let 66B do that work.

The fourth is the inherent power to quash under Section 482. Where the invoked provisions are void or their ingredients absent, continuation of the FIR is an abuse of process, and the High Court's inherent jurisdiction is the appropriate remedy. The logic is cumulative: each limb of the FIR was examined and found wanting — Section 66A because it does not exist, Section 66B because its ingredients were absent, and Section 500 because it could not stand alone on the material — so that nothing remained to investigate. When an FIR has been emptied of every sustainable offence, allowing it to proceed serves no purpose the criminal process recognises, and quashing is not a discretionary indulgence but the correct disposal.

What this changes for practice

The order is a clean, quotable authority for defence counsel moving to quash any post-2015 FIR that invokes Section 66A. The "high-handedness" framing strengthens arguments for cost or accountability against the State, recasting continued registration as a disregard of binding precedent rather than a venial error. The treatment of Section 66B is equally useful: it forecloses the common tactic of bolstering a void 66A charge with a 66B limb that the facts do not support.

More broadly, the ruling adds to the pressure on State police academies and prosecutors to scrub Section 66A from charge-sheet templates and FIR-registration software. The persistence of the provision at the police-station level is, on the Court's analysis, a systemic compliance failure that quashing alone does not cure. Each successful quashing relieves an individual accused but leaves the registration machinery untouched, so the next FIR carries the same dead provision. That is why the Court's language reached past the case before it to the conduct of the police as an institution: an order confined to the facts would have repaired one injury without addressing the recurring source of it.

There is also a lesson for how composite cyber-FIRs should be read. The pairing of a void Section 66A with a misapplied Section 66B is not accidental; it reflects a habit of reaching for whatever IT Act provisions are to hand when an electronic communication is complained of. Counsel resisting such an FIR should test each cyber-limb against its actual ingredients rather than treating the cluster as a single charge — as the Court did here, dismantling Section 66B on the absence of a stolen resource quite separately from the void status of Section 66A.

Trajectory

The ruling is part of the long, embarrassing afterlife of Section 66A. Despite Shreya Singhal and the Supreme Court's subsequent directions ordering States to stop registering 66A cases, FIRs keep appearing — and High Courts keep quashing them. This Bombay (Aurangabad) order joins a recurring line of such interventions. Expect continued citation in 66A-quashing petitions across High Courts, renewed pressure on prosecutors to remove the provision from registration software, and continued instances of the 66B over-reach the Court flagged here. Watch for systemic directions, which some High Courts and the Supreme Court have mooted, including compliance audits of pending 66A cases. The deeper account of the provision's "legal zombie" status is set out in our digest of Shreya Singhal v. Union of India.

Related on Valkya

• Shreya Singhal v. Union of India: striking down Section 66A
• TikTok v. Registrar of Trade Marks: a national-security ban and the well-known mark
• Batliboi Environmental v. HPCL: fresh arbitration after a set-aside

Sources

1. Verdictum — "Section 66A Of Information Technology Act Was Declared Unconstitutional, But Offences Are Being Registered Invoking It: Bombay HC Pulls Up Maharashtra Police" (case page, 2024:BHC-AUG:26094-DB; Kankanwadi & Chapalgaonkar JJ.; 7 November 2024).
2. SCC OnLine / SCC Times — Bombay High Court FIR-quashing coverage (bench and holding on Sections 66A/66B).
3. LiveLaw — Bombay High Court Section 66A coverage (bench and outcome corroboration).