SC orders seizure of steno’s diary to check date of order

ALLEGED DELAY IN UPLOADING BAIL ORDER

- Utkarsh Anand

In a move straight out of a courtroom whodunnit, the Supreme Court has ordered the seizure of the notebook of a high court judge’s stenographer to pin down the real date on which an anticipatory bail order was typed and uploaded. The top court said only a “discreet inquiry” into the stenographer’ record and the National Informatics Centre’s (NIC) logs could reveal when the order was actually written, corrected and made public, and whether it was, in fact, backdated.

A bench of justices JK Maheshwari and Vijay Bishnoi passed the unusual directive while hearing a special leave petition filed on August 16 against a Punjab and Haryana High Court order rejecting anticipatory bail. The petitioner had approached the top court without the order copy, saying that the July 31 ruling was never uploaded. On August 20, when the matter first came up, the Supreme Court sought a report from the registrar general of the high court.

That report, however, raised more red flags than it resolved.