Supreme Court orders seizure of high court steno’s diary to check date of order

IN a displace square come out of a courtroom whodunnit, the sublime margaret 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’s 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.The report disclosed that the order was still missing from the website as late as August 20. Only after the registrar general sought an explanation from the judge’s secretary, two days later, on August 22, did the order suddenly appear online. The secretary attributed the delay to the high court judge undergoing surgery between August 1 and 20, but avoided saying when the order was uploaded.“It appears the order impugned was not passed on 31st July, 2025, in fact, it was passed after the order by this court,” the bench observed in its August 29 order.The bench minced no words in criticising the delay. “Immediate action in the matter to report at the earliest, was not taken,” noted the apex court, adding that the sequence of events cast doubt on whether the order existed at all before the Supreme Court intervened.To get to the bottom of it, the court directed: “The steno book of the secretary be seized and it be found out on which date the order was typed (on the website) and corrected on PC (personal computer)…The discreet inquiry be held and the report of the PC from NIC be collected regarding typing and uploading and the same be filed on affidavit.” To be sure, the website of the court does not show the date and time of orders uploaded.While issuing notice to the state of Haryana, the court granted interim protection to the petitioner, directing that no coercive steps be taken against him in the FIR, provided he cooperates with the investigation.The direction comes just days after another bench of the Supreme Court expressed anguish at high courts sitting on reserved judgments for months, often years. On August 25, the court termed the practice “extremely shocking and surprising” and set a three-month deadline. If a judgment is not delivered within three months of being reserved, a bench of justices Sanjay Karol and Prashant Kumar Mishra said, the case must be placed before the chief justice of the high court, who will give the concerned bench two more weeks, failing which, the matter must be reassigned.Warning that such delays erode public faith in the justice system, the Supreme Court in that case reminded high courts that “timely pronouncement of judgments is an essential part of the justice delivery system”. The court even directed registrar generals of all high courts to regularly submit lists of pending reserved judgments to their chief justices for monitoring.“The chief justice shall bring it to the notice of the concerned bench for pronouncing the order within two weeks thereafter, failing which the matter be assigned to another bench,” mandated the August 25 order, reinforcing similar directives issued by the top court in 2011 in a criminal case.