The Committee the Supreme Court Un-Created

Most legal-literacy content treats a Supreme Court judgment as a permanent, final word. This one is a better lesson precisely because it isn’t: it’s the story of the Court checking its own homework.

2017: the committee

In Rajesh Sharma v. State of U.P., a two-judge bench looked at evidence that matrimonial-cruelty complaints sometimes swept in an entire extended family — elderly parents, siblings, sometimes minors — on bare allegations. Its fix: every district would get a Family Welfare Committee. Every complaint would go there first. Ordinarily, no arrest until the committee reported back.

It was a real attempt to solve a real, documented problem. It was also, as a separate writ petition would later argue, a mechanism with no textual home in the Code of Criminal Procedure.

2018: the correction

A three-judge bench — larger, and explicitly revisiting the smaller bench’s directions — agreed with that argument. The offence is classified as cognizable and non-bailable; inserting a mandatory pre-arrest committee review effectively rewrote how police must handle that category of complaint, which is Parliament’s job, not the Court’s. The Family Welfare Committee direction was struck down.

What didn’t change

The Court did not reopen whether the underlying offence should exist, and it did not touch the separate, earlier safeguard from Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar: police still can’t arrest automatically, and still have to record why arrest is necessary. One layer of protection was removed because it wasn’t legally grounded. A different layer, built on firmer ground, stayed exactly where it was.

Why this is worth more than either headline

“The Supreme Court gutted 498A protections” and “the Supreme Court protects women at any cost” are both simpler than what actually happened. What actually happened is a court trying two different fixes to the same real tension — genuine harassment on one side, sweeping unfounded arrests on the other — and discarding the one that didn’t hold up on its own terms.

That is also, not coincidentally, the standard OIM tries to hold itself to. A claim that doesn’t survive scrutiny gets corrected, in public, without pretending it was never made.