(This is a guest post by Ammar Shahid and Syed Raiyyan)
The order passed by the Uttarakhand High Court (“The Court”) on 19th March 2026 in Deepak Kumar @ Akki v. State of Uttarakhand is a tight disposal of a petition that was asking for considerably more than it deserved. Three of four reliefs were turned down, and rightly so. However, the reasoning deployed against a prayer for police protection to Deepak Kumar is receiving significant criticism. It is not that the Court reached the wrong result. It is the path it chose to get there that rests on a doctrinal footing that does not hold up under scrutiny. When a Court ties the availability of relief under Article 21 to a Petitioner’s status as a “suspected accused,” it makes a statement about constitutional entitlement that no precedent supports.
Factual Backdrop
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On Republic Day, 2026, Deepak Kumar (“Petitioner”), a gym owner from Kotdwar, Uttarakhand, intervened when a group entered the shop of one Vakeel Ahmed. He was a seventy-one-year-old shopkeeper and was pressured into removing the word “Baba” from the shop’s name. When the crowd demanded to know who he was, Petitioner identified himself as “Mohammad Deepak.” Days later, a First Information Report (“FIR”) was registered against him and his associate on charges including misconduct, snatching a mobile phone, and criminal intimidation. A mob later gathered near his gym and shouted slogans against him. Petitioner filed his own complaints, and his gym membership dropped from approximately 150 to nearly 15 in the weeks that followed. It was in this backdrop that he approached the High Court under Article 226.
The Petition and its Reliefs
The Petitioners were accused persons in FIR No. 19 of 2026, registered under sections 115(2), 191(1), 351(2) and 352 of the Bhartiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. They approached the Court with four prayers: quashing of the impugned FIR; directions to register FIRs on their own complaint against alleged perpetrators of hate speech; police protection for themselves and their families; and a departmental inquiry against certain police officials for alleged partisan conduct.
The Court dismissed reliefs (ii), (iii), and (iv) at this stage. Relief (i), the quashing of the FIR, was listed for further arguments. On reliefs (ii) and (iv), the reasoning is difficult to fault. On relief (ii), the petitioner had suppressed the registration of two FIRs on his own complaint. Both were registered at the same police station as the impugned FIR, and both predated the writ petition by more than a fortnight. Additionally, the statutory remedy under Section 175(3) of Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (“BNSS”), 2023 was available and unused. On relief (iv), a prayer for departmental proceedings against investigating officers while one’s own investigation is still pending practically invites the inference of an attempt to complicate the inquiry. The Court’s scepticism there is entirely well-founded and supported by reasoning. It is relief (iii), the prayer for police protection, that demands a harder look.
The Court’s Reasoning on Relief (iii)
The Court refused police protection primarily on the ground that a “suspected accused” who is under investigation cannot pray for adequate police protection, and that the police administration is “competent enough to keep on watch for his safety.” The Court also noted that the concerned officer had conveyed by telephone that there was no credible threat perception. The last ground of there being no credible threat was a perfectly adequate basis to refuse the relief. The first ground, on the other hand, is constitutionally tenuous.
Entitlement to Relief vs. Merits of Relief
There is a distinction in adjudication that has been overlooked in the order: the distinction between a petitioner’s entitlement to seek a particular relief and whether the petitioner has made out a case for that relief on the merits. These are entirely separate questions, and treating them as one produces reasoning that goes further than any given case requires.
Entitlement asks: Is this person, as a matter of constitutional or legal principle, capable of invoking this relief at all? Merits ask: has this person placed sufficient material before the Court to justify granting it? A Court can answer “yes” to the first and “no” to the second, and proceed to deny the relief without any doctrinal baggage. What a Court cannot do is answer “no” to the first question when the relief in question flows from Part III of the Constitution. Article 21 has long been understood to encompass an affirmative obligation on the State to protect it. In Akansha v. State of U.P., the Allahabad High Court held precisely this. The right to protection of life is a constitutional obligation of the State, and this obligation runs independently of the petitioner’s conduct or legal status.
Consider how this plays out in practice. When the Court says that a “suspected accused” cannot pray for police protection, it is not just deciding this case. It is articulating a principle. That principle, taken at face value, would mean that any person against whom an FIR is registered loses the ability to approach a Court for protection of their life until the investigation concludes. The logical endpoint of that proposition is uncomfortable: a person facing genuine, credible, life-threatening danger from a third party would be turned away at the door of the writ Court simply because he is simultaneously accused in another matter. Yet it is what the reasoning in this order, read literally, imports.
The merits dimension, by contrast, was entirely workable on the facts of this case. The petitioner placed no concrete material before the Court demonstrating a real threat. The investigating officer himself reported no credible threat perception. In those circumstances, the Court had everything it needed to deny the relief on the merits: there was simply nothing on the record to justify invoking the Court’s extraordinary writ jurisdiction for police deployment. The entitlement question did not need to be answered, and answering it the way the Court did created a proposition that the facts of the case did not require. This distinction is not novel, and the Courts have been asked to apply it in precisely this context before.
What Constitutional Precedent Actually Establishes
The Supreme Court’s Article 21 jurisprudence has maintained one consistent thread: the right to life does not shrink based on a person’s status in criminal proceedings. Several cases make this unavoidably clear.
In Arun Gavli v. State of Maharashtra, the Bombay High Court addressed this question of entitlement in the context of a person with a formidable criminal history. The Court’s approach was that the State’s obligation to provide protection under Article 21 is not neutralised by the fact that the person threatened carries FIRs or pending cases against him. The inquiry must remain limited to the threat, not the character of the person threatened. The Court held that “if a person like the petitioner, makes out a specific case of a genuine and imminent threat to his life on a particular occasion or at a particular place, the State Government would not be justified in refusing to grant armed police protection to him qua that particular occasion or place. This would, however, be subject to occasional review by the Threat Perception Committee constituted by the State Government.”
The Madras High Court’s position in K. Kalaivanan v. Superintendent of Police, Thiruvarur District is to a similar effect. The petitioner was involved in criminal cases and sought protection from rival group threats. The Court, in directing appropriate protection, reiterated that the right to life does not stand diminished by the existence of criminal proceedings against a person. Further, it is for the police to assess the credibility of the threat on the ground and not for the Court to bar the gateway to relief based on the petitioner’s legal status.
In Sunil Batra v. Delhi Administration, the Supreme Court held that even a convict retains fundamental rights. The Court drew a clear line: lawful custody restricts only those rights that cannot be exercised because of confinement itself. All other rights remain intact. If a convicted prisoner retains rights under Article 21, the argument that a “suspected accused,” who benefits from the full constitutional presumption of innocence, has a diminished entitlement to seek protection of his life would be legally untenable.
Taken together, these decisions convey what the Uttarakhand High Court’s order does not engage with. Courts have been asked this question of entitlement several times and have answered it in the affirmative. The identity, criminal status, or legal record of the person seeking protection goes, at most, to the credibility of the threat claim. It does not operate as a threshold disqualification.
Conclusion
To be fair to the Court, the outcome on relief (iii) is defensible. The petitioner placed no material before the Court establishing a genuine, immediate, or concrete danger. The police’s own assessment was that no credible threat existed. The relief simply was not made out on the facts. These were sufficient, clean, and principled grounds to deny the prayer.
However, the path the Court took to get there is a path that constitutional precedent does not sanction. Precedents converge on the same point: criminal status is not a constitutional filter through which the right to life must pass.
Courts often deal with petitions that are, as this one appears to have been, partly instrumental. The instinct to reject them firmly is sound. However, the legally sound path is in rejecting them on the ground that corresponds to the actual problem of insufficient merits. Formulating a broader principle that could one day be applied against someone whose threat is entirely real and whose only misfortune is the existence of an FIR bearing his name is untenable. One ground was enough here. Two grounds, when one is constitutionally unsound, is one ground too many.
