Pawan Kumar Singh v. State of U.P.: no power to alter sections at cognisance

The facts in brief

An FIR was registered against the applicants for offences under Sections 354A (sexual harassment), 504 (intentional insult to provoke breach of the peace) and 506 (criminal intimidation) of the Indian Penal Code. After the police submitted their report and cognisance was taken, the applicants invoked the inherent jurisdiction of the High Court under Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, in substance challenging the offences taken on file and the order of cognisance.

The matter came before Justice Praveen Kumar Giri as a Single Judge of the Allahabad High Court. The 354A/504/506 combination is staple matter for the Allahabad bench, and the application raised a recurring procedural question: at what stage, and by whom, may the penal sections in a charge-sheet be pruned? The Court declined to interfere under Section 482 and relegated the applicants to the remedy of discharge before the trial court.

The procedural question

The question was where the power to alter the constellation of offences resides. When a charge-sheet lands before a Magistrate, the document carries the sections the investigating officer considered made out. An accused who believes the report is over-charged — that some sections do not lie on the material — naturally wants those sections removed at the earliest opportunity. The temptation is to ask the Magistrate to drop them at cognisance, or, failing that, to ask the High Court to excise them under its inherent jurisdiction.

Both routes, the Court held, are misconceived. Cognisance under Section 190 is the act of taking judicial notice of the offence — of setting the prosecution in motion — not the occasion for the court to second-guess the investigating officer's selection of sections. The selection is tested later, when charges are framed under the discharge-and-charge provisions, at which point the court applies its mind to the material and decides what the accused must face. The case therefore turns on a clean separation between two distinct procedural stages.

What the Court held

No power to add or subtract sections at cognisance

The Court held that, at the stage of taking cognisance, a Judicial Magistrate cannot add, subtract, exclude or include any penal section mentioned, or omitted, in the police report. At cognisance the Magistrate takes the report as it stands. The alteration of sections — the inclusion of offences the report omitted, or the exclusion of offences the report named — is permissible only at the stage of framing of charge, when the court applies its mind to the material and decides what offences the accused must answer.

The Girish Radhakrishnan Varde principle

The Court reiterated this position on the authority of the Supreme Court in State of Gujarat v. Girish Radhakrishnan Varde, applying that principle in the high-volume context of UP criminal litigation. The architecture the Supreme Court described — cognisance as the threshold act, charge-framing as the stage of judicial application of mind to the offences — was treated as governing both the legacy CrPC prosecutions and, going forward, their BNSS analogues, since the cognisance-and-charge structure carries straight across the IPC-to-BNS and CrPC-to-BNSS transition.

Discharge, not Section 482

Applying that principle, the Court declined to interfere under Section 482 with the cognisance order and relegated the applicants to the remedy of discharge before the trial court. The grievance that particular sections were not made out could be properly agitated at the discharge or charge-framing stage, where the trial court would test the sections against the material. The Court thus located the accused's remedy in the discharge mechanism rather than in inherent-jurisdiction quashing, dismissing the Section 482 application with liberty to seek discharge.

The doctrinal architecture

The judgment draws a bright line between two stages that practitioners frequently blur. Cognisance is not charge-framing. The Magistrate's power to mould the offences — to add what the report omitted or remove what it wrongly included — is a charge-stage power, not a cognisance-stage power. At cognisance the report is taken as it is; the judicial sifting of the offences happens later. This separation is not a technicality. It allocates a specific function to a specific stage and refuses to let the cognisance order become a premature merits hearing on which sections lie.

The second move is to channel the accused's remedy correctly. Where a report is thought over-charged, the proper course is discharge before the trial court — not a Section 482 petition (and, going forward, not its BNSS Section 528 analogue) seeking to delete sections. This is a docket-discipline ruling as much as a doctrinal one: it directs section-selection disputes to the forum designed to hear them, and resists the use of inherent jurisdiction as a shortcut around the discharge stage. The counsel-facing takeaway is direct — do not file Section 482 to delete sections; build the deletion argument for the discharge hearing.

The transitional dimension gives the holding durability. Because the cognisance-and-charge architecture is preserved in the BNSS, the principle governs both legacy CrPC prosecutions and new BNSS matters alike. A ruling anchored in the CrPC and in Girish Radhakrishnan Varde thus continues to control the analysis under the new code, which matters in a period when the two regimes run in parallel across pending dockets.

The deeper rationale is about the nature of cognisance itself. Taking cognisance is the moment at which the court takes judicial notice of an offence and assumes seisin of the matter; it is a step directed at the prosecution, not at the offences. The investigating officer, who has examined the material, makes the initial selection of sections; the court's role at cognisance is to decide whether to proceed on the report, not to substitute its own view of which offences the material supports. To permit the Magistrate to add or drop sections at this threshold would be to require a judicial assessment of the evidence before the stage designed for that assessment has been reached — and to do so on a record that has not yet been tested through the discharge mechanism. The Court's refusal to let cognisance become a premature merits hearing is therefore faithful to the function the stage was meant to perform.

That allocation also protects the integrity of the discharge stage. The discharge-and-charge provisions exist precisely so that the court can apply its mind to the material and decide what the accused must answer, after both sides have had the opportunity to address the offences. If the sections could be pruned at cognisance, the discharge stage would be pre-empted, and the accused would lose the structured opportunity the Code gives him to contest the offences on the record. By insisting that section-selection disputes be resolved at discharge, the Court keeps each stage doing its own work and preserves the orderly sequence the Code prescribes — cognisance first, then charge, with the merits of the offences tested at the latter.

What the judgment did not decide

The judgment is concerned with the power to alter sections, not with the merits of the particular sections in the underlying FIR. The Court expressly left the question whether Sections 354A, 504 and 506 were made out on the material to be decided at the discharge stage; it expressed no view on the substance of the allegations. The applicants retained their full ability to argue, before the trial court, that the sections should not survive.

Nor did the judgment disturb the legitimate scope of Section 482 in genuinely appropriate cases — where, for instance, the FIR discloses no offence at all or the proceedings are an abuse of process. Its holding is narrower: that a Section 482 petition cannot be used as a vehicle to do at the High Court level what the discharge stage is designed to do at the trial level, namely test and prune the sections.

After the judgment

The ruling will be invoked routinely by trial courts to resist applications urging Magistrates to drop sections at cognisance, and by High Court benches to dismiss Section 482 and BNSS Section 528 petitions that are, in substance, discharge arguments in disguise. It reinforces a broader Allahabad effort, visible across 2025 and into 2026, to restore procedural discipline to the cognisance stage and to keep each procedural step doing its own work.

For practitioners, the practical consequence is a shift in where section-selection battles are fought. The discharge stage becomes the principal forum for arguing that particular offences do not lie, and counsel are well advised to marshal that argument for the trial court rather than expending it on a Section 482 petition that, on this authority, is bound to be relegated to discharge.

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Sources

1. Verdictum — Pawan Kumar Singh & Ors. v. State of Uttar Pradesh & Anr. (2025:AHC:191246) case report: https://www.verdictum.in/court-updates/high-courts/allahabad-high-court/pawan-kumar-singh-ors-v-state-of-uttar-pradesh-anr-2025ahc191246-1602490
2. BarandBench — "Cognizance taken, no power to review own order": Allahabad High Court: https://www.barandbench.com/news/litigation/cognizance-taken-no-power-to-review-own-order-allahabad-hc