Social Action Forum for Manav Adhikar v. Union of India
Issue
Whether the Family Welfare Committee screening mechanism — created a year earlier in Rajesh Sharma v. State of U.P. to review matrimonial-cruelty complaints before arrest — was a valid judicial direction.
What the court held
A three-judge bench held that the Family Welfare Committee mechanism had no basis in the Code of Criminal Procedure and could not be judicially engrafted onto the statute, and struck it down. The Court preserved the separate, statute-based safeguard against automatic arrest that Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar had already established.
What the court did not hold
That the underlying matrimonial-cruelty offence should be diluted, that complaints under it are generally false, or that arrested persons are automatically entitled to bail. The Court removed one specific, non-statutory screening layer — it did not reopen whether the offence itself should exist, and it left the Arnesh Kumar arrest checklist standing.
Why OIM cares
This is the Supreme Court revisiting its own prior guidance within about fourteen months, on the ground that the guidance went beyond what the Code of Criminal Procedure actually authorised. It is a concrete, on-the-record example of the judiciary applying to itself the same discipline OIM asks of its readers: when reasoning doesn't hold up, the position changes — it isn't defended out of momentum.
Context
In 2017, in Rajesh Sharma v. State of U.P., a two-judge bench of the Supreme Court — responding to evidence that matrimonial-cruelty complaints were sometimes used to sweep in an entire extended family on bare allegations — directed every district to set up a Family Welfare Committee. Every complaint under the matrimonial-cruelty provision would go to that committee first; ordinarily, no arrest would follow until it reported back.
A writ petition subsequently asked the Court to reconsider that mechanism, arguing that it had no textual basis in the Code of Criminal Procedure and, because the underlying offence is classified as cognizable and non-bailable, effectively rewrote how the police were required to handle a category of complaint — something the legislature, not the Court, is meant to do.
What the Court actually did
A three-judge bench — a larger bench than the one that had created the committees — agreed. It held that prescribing the constitution and duties of Family Welfare Committees did not flow from any provision of the Code, and struck that specific direction down. At the same time, it did not disturb the core safeguard against mechanical arrest that Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar had already established four years earlier: police still cannot arrest automatically, and must record why arrest is necessary.
Where this sits in the OIM comparison
Read alongside Arnesh Kumar, this case shows a Court working out, in real time and across several years, where the line sits between “protect against wrongful arrest” and “create a screening layer the law itself never authorised.” It corrected itself once it concluded it had gone too far in one direction — without abandoning the safeguard it still thought was justified. That is a more accurate picture of how this area of law has actually developed than either “the Supreme Court gutted 498A” or “the Supreme Court protects women at any cost.” Neither headline survives reading both judgments.