Supreme Court Reverses Default Bail in UAPA Case — IO's 'Sufficient Material' Report Isn't a Completed Chargesheet

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Overview

The Supreme Court has set aside a Bombay High Court order that had granted default bail to two accused in a case investigated by Maharashtra’s Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (UAPA). The Court held that a solitary line in the prosecution’s extension application — stating that “there is enough evidence to file a charge sheet” — could not be read to mean that the investigation was complete, and that the High Court had wrongly used that statement to curtail the ATS’s power to keep investigating. The underlying criminal case remains at the trial stage; this article expresses no view on the allegations against the accused, which remain to be proved in accordance with law.

Case: The State of Maharashtra & Anr. v. Momin Moiuddin Gulam Hasan @ Moin Mistri & Anr.
Citation: 2026 INSC 1021 / 2026 LiveLaw (SC) 966
Bench: Justice Prashant Kumar Mishra and Justice Shree Chandrashekhar (opinion authored by Justice Shree Chandrashekhar)
Date: 21 September 2026

Facts

A First Information Report was registered on 21 September 2022 at the ATS Police Station, Mumbai, alleging offences under Sections 120B, 121A and 153A of the Indian Penal Code, 1860 and Section 13(1)(b) of the UAPA against five persons, including the two respondents. The respondents were arrested on 22 September 2022. Because the case involved seized electronic devices (mobile phones, laptops, hard disks) sent for forensic examination, whose report was awaited, the investigating agency sought and obtained a first extension of 30 days beyond the standard 90-day period, under the proviso to Section 43D(2) of the UAPA. A second extension application, filed on 12 January 2023 seeking a further 15 days, stated that “there is enough evidence to file a charge sheet against the accused,” but sought the extra time on the ground that sanction for prosecution under Section 45 of the UAPA was still awaited. The Special Judge (Greater Mumbai) granted this second extension on 18 January 2023. The respondents’ default-bail applications — first as premature, then on merits — were rejected by the Special Judge. A chargesheet was eventually filed on 2 February 2023.

The respondents challenged both the extension order and the rejection of default bail before the Bombay High Court. The High Court held that once the prosecution itself stated there was “sufficient material” for a chargesheet, the investigation must be treated as complete, and an extension could not be granted merely to await sanction — since sanction is required only for taking cognizance (Section 196, Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973 read with Section 45, UAPA), not for filing a chargesheet. On that reasoning, the High Court held the second extension order illegal and declared that an indefeasible right to default bail had accrued to the respondents on 19 January 2023. The State of Maharashtra and the ATS appealed to the Supreme Court. The trial on the chargesheet filed against the accused remains pending; nothing in this summary should be read as a comment on the truth of the allegations.

What the Court Held

1. A statement that “sufficient material” exists does not equal a completed investigation. The Court held: “A statement made by the prosecution that there is sufficient material for filing the charge sheet cannot be interpreted by the Court as if the investigation in the case was complete. Such a statement made on behalf of the prosecution cannot be used against it to curtail the power of the ATS to complete the investigation or carry out further investigation.” It added that “a sentence in an order or a judgment cannot be lifted out of its context,” and that “the High Court committed a serious error in construing a solitary statement made in the second extension application to hold that the investigation was complete.”

2. Sanction goes to cognizance, not to completion of investigation — but that did not help the respondents here. The Court held: “There is no doubt and the legal position is very clear that the requirement of producing sanction for prosecution comes at the stage of cognizance and a charge sheet can be forwarded to the Court without a sanction order from the appropriate Government.” However, it held that this principle did not resolve the real question in the case — whether the investigation itself was, in fact, complete — because the prosecution’s own case was that scientific/forensic data was still being analysed. (The High Court, whose reasoning the Supreme Court overturned, had used similar language — that “the embargo is on taking cognizance and not on filing a charge sheet” — to reach the opposite conclusion, that the investigation was already complete.)

3. Investigation is the exclusive domain of the police; courts cannot declare it “complete” from a stray line in an application. The Court held: “The investigation of a crime is the exclusive domain of the police. It is not the jurisdiction of the Court to decide when the investigation in a case should stop. It must be left to the discretion of the investigating agency to decide the course of investigation and to proceed in its own manner. The Court cannot curtail the statutory powers vested in the police except in an exceptional case on facts or where there is a statutory bar.”

4. On the facts, the investigation was not shown to be complete. The Court held: “It is not possible, rather imaginary, to think that the investigation in the case by the ATS was complete in all respects,” noting that the prosecution had specifically pleaded it needed time to analyse scientific data and prepare a report for the sanctioning authority. It held that the High Court’s entire discussion of sanction was “off-route” and that its decision to interfere with the extension order was “palpably wrong.”

5. The second extension order was legal, and the default-bail application was rightly dismissed. The Court set aside the High Court’s judgment dated 15 July 2024, restored the Special Judge’s order of 18 January 2023 granting the second extension, and dismissed the respondents’ default-bail application. Respondent No. 1 was directed to surrender within 30 days and was left free to seek regular bail.

Precedents Relied On

State (NCT of Delhi) v. Raj Kumar @ Lovepreet @ Lovely, (2024) 2 SCC 632 — the Court relied on this decision’s reasoning on Section 43D(2)(b) of the UAPA to hold that the Bombay High Court had erred in distinguishing it; it also traces the UAPA extension principle to State of Maharashtra v. Surendra Pundlik Gadling & Ors., (2019) 5 SCC 178, a case with a similarly pending forensic report.
Judgebir Singh @ Jasbir Singh Samra @ Jasbir & Ors. v. National Investigation Agency, (2023) 17 SCC 48, and Suresh Kumar Bhikamchand Jain v. State of Maharashtra & Anr., (2013) 3 SCC 77 — both affirmed for the settled principle that sanction relates to cognizance and not to completion of investigation, but the Court held that neither case decided the specific question before it (whether a court can declare an investigation complete from the record).
The King Emperor v. Khawaja Nazir Ahmad, (1944) SCC OnLine PC 29, and State of Bihar & Anr. v. J.A.C. Saldanha & Ors., (1980) 1 SCC 554 — relied on for the principle that investigation of a crime is the exclusive domain of the police and courts do not ordinarily interfere with that statutory function.

Takeaway

This decision draws a sharp line between what an investigating agency says in an application for more time and what the record actually shows about the state of an investigation. A line like “there is sufficient material to file a chargesheet” is common drafting in extension applications; the Supreme Court has now held that such a line, read in isolation, cannot be treated as an admission that the investigation is over — particularly where the same application explains, in the same breath, that forensic or sanction-related work is still pending. For UAPA matters, this preserves the extended 90-to-180-day timeline under Section 43D(2) as a genuine tool for complex investigations, rather than one that can be defeated by parsing a single sentence out of context. The FIR in this case predates the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS), so the applicable default-bail provision throughout was Section 167(2) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1973, as modified for UAPA offences by Section 43D(2) — not Section 187 of the BNSS, which governs only investigations under FIRs registered on or after 1 July 2024.

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