Calcutta High Court Stays Coercive Action Against Abhishek Banerjee, Seeks Full List Of FIRs

"Where is the necessity to take the petitioner into custody?" That question, posed by the Calcutta High Court to the state on Thursday, framed the outcome of a hearing in which Trinamool Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee sought urgent protection from a growing list of FIRs filed against him since May.

Justice Saugata Bhattacharya, unconvinced that arrest was warranted at this stage, ordered that no coercive steps be taken against Banerjee until the case is heard again on August 6, and directed the police to hand over a full account of every FIR registered against him so far.

Banerjee's plea, filed under Article 226, does not ask the court to quash the FIRs outright just yet, it asks for breathing room while a larger question is argued out: whether eleven complaints and FIRs, most of them lodged in the weeks after the Assembly election results came out on May 4, add up to a coordinated campaign rather than genuine law enforcement.

Senior Advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan, representing Banerjee, drew a direct parallel to 2021, when BJP's Suvendu Adhikari faced a similar wave of prosecutions after the TMC won that year's election. Courts had granted him relief then, Sankaranarayanan argued, and the same logic should apply now that the political roles are reversed. "In each of those cases, this Court granted them relief," he told the Bench.

The government side resisted on more than one front. Additional Solicitor General S.V. Raju objected that Banerjee's petition improperly bundled unrelated FIRs into one "omnibus" plea, suggesting that if the court wanted to examine only complaints with disclosed particulars, Banerjee should have filed separate petitions for each. The Bench did not dismiss the case over this, but it trimmed what it would consider restricting itself to FIRs where facts were already on record, since even the state had not shared details of some complaints with the petitioner.

On the substance, Sankaranarayanan walked the court through individual complaints he said didn't hold up to scrutiny. One stemmed from a tweet in which Banerjee used the phrase "Bangla birodhi Gujarati gang" political rhetoric, he argued, not incitement. Another concerned a remark about playing music loudly at a rally. Others reached far into the past: an illegal-mining allegation from 2017, a cyclone-relief fund dispute from 2020, and questions about a private welfare scheme for elderly beneficiaries that Banerjee ran from 2023.

In each case, he said, there was no explanation for why police acted only now, and pointed out that seven of the eleven complaints came from a single individual who had twice lost elections to Banerjee. Evidence, he argued, of a pattern rather than coincidence, and grounds for the court to intervene under the Supreme Court's test in State of Haryana v. Bhajan Lal against abuse of the legal process.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta, appearing for the Centre, rejected that framing entirely. Banerjee, he said, was effectively asking the court for a standing order against any future FIR relief the Constitution does not provide, and one that would set apart an elected politician from any ordinary citizen facing similar complaints. Political rivalry between complainants and the accused, he added, does not by itself make an investigation malicious.

The Bench stopped short of accepting either side's full position. It declined Sankaranarayanan's request to pre-emptively shield Banerjee from FIRs that might be registered in the future, telling him that any fresh complaints would need to come through separate pleadings, with the relevant complainants made parties.

But on the FIRs already before it, the court was blunt about the optics: "against an ordinary person so many FIRs are not registered," it observed, while making clear it was not ruling on the merits of any single case at this stage. That balancing act: protection from arrest without a verdict on maintainability or merit, will now play out further when the matter will be heard next on August 6.