A Delhi court on Saturday (October 10, 2026) dismissed a plea by the head of the Cockroach Janta Party’s (CJP) legal wing Ratna Singh, alleging that she had been “wrongfully confined” by the police outside her residence in Jangpura amid a massive police crackdown in the national capital to thwart a youth protest demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar over large-scale deletions of names from electoral rolls.
Ms. The court found that the plea suffered from procedural deficiencies. Apart from the absence of the requisite affidavit, it noted that the application did not identify the police personnel against whom the allegations had been levelled. Singh’s application did not identify any particular police officer against whom the allegations had been made. Accordingly, the court dismissed the plea. She had been on her way to join lawyers protesting outside the Supreme Court when she was allegedly prevented from leaving, Ms.
Singh told The Hindu that Delhi Police personnel had surrounded the car in which she was sitting outside her residence with advocates Tara Narula and Shivangi Sharma earlier on Saturday (October 10, 2026). Referring to Section 175(4) of the BNSS, which requires a magistrate to consider a report from the superior officer of a public servant accused of committing an offence in the discharge of official duties before ordering an investigation, the judge noted that Ms.
Police personnel had cited “verbal orders from above” to prevent her from leaving, she alleged. Chief Judicial Magistrate Abhinav Pandey of the Saket District Court held that the application was not prima facie maintainable in its present form, observing that it failed to comply with the “statutory requirement” of filing an affidavit attesting to the veracity of the allegations, and to specify the exact location of the alleged confinement for determining the court’s jurisdiction. “The exact location of the vehicle has not been mentioned and the determination of the jurisdiction has been left to the presumption of this court… For the aforesaid reasons, without delving into the merits of the matter and nature of allegations, this court is of the opinion that the present application is not even prima facie maintainable in the present form and accordingly stands dismissed on the aforesaid grounds,” the order stated. In the absence of such identification, it was not possible to determine the “Officer Superior” from whom the requisite report could be sought, the court said. Singh said.
