The Supreme Court has sent out a reminder from the judicial pulpit: if you forget to file that affidavit with your Section 156(3) CrPC complaint, don’t panic—just fix it before the Magistrate moves the needle.
This reaffirmation came while Justices Sudhanshu Dhulia and Ahsanuddin Amanullah were handling a plea that challenged a High Court’s refusal to quash an FIR. The appellants tried to hang their case on a technicality—that the complainant had skipped the affidavit step required under the 2015 Priyanka Srivastava ruling when asking the Magistrate to trigger an FIR.
That argument didn’t stick.
The top court agreed to toss the FIRs, but not because of the affidavit blunder. Why? Because, in this case, the affidavit was eventually filed—just not at the time the complaint was submitted. Crucially, it made its way into the file before the Magistrate gave any directive.
Calling it a “curable defect,” the Court said the High Court wasn’t wrong in seeing this as a technical misstep rather than a fatal flaw. “The required formalities were done before the referral order was made,” the bench said. “In our considered opinion, this approach cannot be labelled erroneous.”
Justice Amanullah, penning the judgment, distilled the law into a clean checklist:
- Yes, Priyanka Srivastava guidelines are mandatory.
- Yes, they apply prospectively.
- Missing affidavit? That’s a fixable mistake—so long as it’s sorted before the Magistrate takes action.
- But if the Magistrate acts without that affidavit in place, the whole order can be knocked down.
Backing its stance, the Court also leaned on rulings from Ramesh Kumar Bung v State of Telangana (2024) and Kaniskh Sinha v State of West Bengal (2025), both of which treated Priyanka Srivastava’s affidavit rule as binding, but not retroactive.
The message is clear: complainants have some leeway, but timing is everything. If the affidavit shows up after the Magistrate’s order, the legal machinery can be reversed. But if it lands on record just in time, the complaint can roll forward—flaw cured, no harm done.
