Court not a forum for conjecture: Delhi court clears deported man of Passports Act charge
A Delhi court has set aside the order of a magistrate framing charges against a man under the Passports Act for allegedly possessing a fake Malaysian visa, saying there were no allegations that he travelled to Malaysia or forged the visa in the country.
The court said that a criminal court is not a “forum for conjecture, it is a forum where guilt, even at the stage of framing of charge, must rest on a foundation of evidence disclosing a prima facie triable offence”.
Additional Sessions Judge Saurabh Partap Singh Laler was hearing the revision petition filed by Palwinder Singh against the January 29, 2026, order of a magisterial court framing charges against him under the Passports Act.
Palwinder Singh departed for Baku in Azerbaijan, via Turkey, on November 12, 2017, and on reaching Istanbul, he produced a Turkish paper e-visa along with an additional US visa affixed at page 16 of his passport.
He was deported from Turkey on the grounds that his Turkish visa was rendered invalid since the accompanying US visa was found to be fake.
A Malaysian visa sticker affixed to a page of the passport was also found “not genuine”. But his Turkish and Azerbaijani e-visas were found to be “genuine”.
Singh was then deported from Istanbul, Turkey, to IGI Airport, New Delhi, following which a case was registered against him under IPC Sections 420 (cheating), 468 (forgery for purpose of cheating) and 471 (using as genuine a forged document), besides provisions of the Passports Act.
While a magisterial court had then discharged Singh for the fake US visa due to lack of territorial jurisdiction and legal sanction, it had framed charges against him under Section 12 (offences and penalties) of the Passport Act regarding the Malaysian visa.
The magistrate said that since the fake Malaysian visa was dated October 16, 2017, before Singh departed from India on November 12, 2017, it must have been procured in India.
In an order dated July 2, the Judge Laler said, “The trial (magisterial) court, having rightly discharged the accused or revisionist for offences under Sections 420, 468 and 471 of the IPC, erred in framing charge under Section 12 of the Passport Act as the essential evidentiary link connecting the Malaysian visa to any act of departure from or entry into India, or to its procurement within India, is conspicuously absent from the record.”
The court said a visa sticker bearing an earlier date does not by itself establish either that it was affixed to the passport in India or that it was present on a page of the passport when he crossed Indian immigration on November 12.
“Such an inference could have been legitimately drawn only if there was material to show that the revisionist actually departed India carrying that visa and used it, or attempted to use it, at any point — whether in India or upon arrival in Malaysia. No such material exists on the record. Indeed, there is no allegation that the revisionist ever travelled to or attempted to travel to Malaysia at all,” the court said.
It is not the case of the prosecution that the visa was forged or fabricated within India before Singh’s departure to Azerbaijan via Turkey, it added.
The court said, “What remains, at best, is an unexplained and unaccounted-for entry in the passport, which may reflect a contravention of the general requirement of maintaining a travel document free of extraneous, invalid endorsements, but such a bare possibility, unsupported by evidence of use or origin in India, cannot be equated with the offence contemplated under Section 12 of the Passport Act.”
It said a charge cannot be framed on the strength of a document “whose provenance is wholly unestablished”, merely because its date happens to precede the date of departure.
“The requirement of Section 188 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (sanction for offences committed outside India) applies to the Malaysian visa with the same force as it applies to the US visa,” the court said, discharging Singh under the Passports Act provision.
The judge observed that the wheels of criminal justice must never be set in motion on the strength of surmise, suspicion, or the mere presence of a suspicious document, however curious its circumstances may appear at first blush.
“A criminal court is not a forum for conjecture; it is a forum where guilt, even at the stage of framing of charge, must rest on a foundation of evidence disclosing a prima facie triable offence, and not on the silent, unexplained presence of a piece of paper pasted on a page of a passport,” he said.
