Bhubaneswar: The Orissa High Court has quashed a decades-old criminal complaint against Reliance Industries Limited (RIL) and its chairman Mukesh Ambani over a faulty mobile handset purchased in 2003.
The court also imposed a Rs 1,000 cost on the complainant and criticised a subordinate magistrate for issuing summons without without adequate judicial scrutiny.
A single bench of Justice S K Panigrahi, in an order passed on March 31, highlighted the absurdity of dragging the head of one of India’s largest corporate empires into court over a minor consumer dispute from more than 20 years ago. The judge remarked that endorsing such a practice could lead to extreme scenarios, such as “a passenger could summon the railway minister for a delayed train,” a postal customer suing the postmaster general over a lost letter, or a consumer prosecuting a Union minister for a defective ration item.
The case dates back to a 2003 telecom subscription by Prafulla Kumar Mishra, a Rourkela resident and advocate. Mishra paid Rs 501 to join Reliance Infocomm’s ‘Kar Lo Duniya Mutthi Mein’ scheme, receiving a handset from a local dealer while agreeing to monthly payments. He alleged that the handset was defective and the promised services were inadequate, leading him to file complaints against Ambani, then chairman of Reliance Infocomm, and others.
This was the fourth round of criminal proceedings by Mishra on the same facts.
Earlier complaints from 2003 and 2004 were quashed by the High Court in 2004 and 2005, with the Supreme Court dismissing related special leave petitions in 2007. Despite repeated rejections finding no criminal liability, the matter persisted, culminating in fresh summons issued by the SDJM, Panposh, on January 27.
Justice Panigrahi acknowledged that Mishra may have had a genuine grievance over the handset and services but stressed that “a sense of grievance, however deep, does not entitle a person to weaponise the criminal law against those who have already been found to bear no criminal liability.”
The court described the 23-year pursuit as a “sustained and almost unrelenting” abuse of process over a trivial Rs 501 transaction involving a local dealer, not directly RIL or Ambani.
The High Court expressed serious concern over the lower court’s handling: “Summons were issued to an unrelated individual and to a company having no apparent connection with the transaction, on the basis of a complaint reiterating allegations already examined and rejected by this court and by the Supreme Court.” It emphasised that magistrates must apply their mind before initiating criminal proceedings, especially in cases showing signs of repetition.
Mishra has been asked to deposit the Rs 1,000 cost with the Juvenile Justice Fund of the Odisha State Legal Services Authority within four weeks.
