Central Bureau of Investigation, Special Investigation Cell v. Anupam Kulkarni

Remand is the most heavily examined part of the investigation chapter, and the trap in it is the difference between the fifteen days of custody a Magistrate may authorise at the outset and the sixty or ninety days within which the investigation must be completed. Students routinely write that the police may have custody for sixty or ninety days. They may not.

Anupam Kulkarni is the decision that fixes the boundary between police custody and judicial custody, and it is the case to cite for the proposition that the first fifteen days are the only window in which police custody can be had.

The question concerned the nature of the custody that a Magistrate may authorise under s. 167 of the 1973 Code after the initial fifteen-day period has expired, where the investigation is still incomplete.

The Court reiterated that custody after the expiry of the first fifteen days can only be judicial custody, for the rest of the period of ninety days or sixty days as the case may be. Police custody, if found necessary, can therefore be ordered only during the first fifteen days.

Within those first fifteen days the nature of the custody may be altered from police custody to judicial custody and back. Where the accused is involved in another case he may be re-arrested and remanded to police custody in that case, with the permission of the Magistrate.

The section gives the Magistrate two distinct powers, and the decision keeps them apart. The first is a power to authorise detention in such custody as he thinks fit — police or judicial — and it is capped in time. The second is a power to authorise continued detention while the investigation runs its statutory course, and it is not a power to hand the accused back to the investigating agency. Reading the sixty or ninety day outer limit as though it extended the first power would convert a protection into a licence: the cap on police custody exists precisely because custodial interrogation is the point at which the risk to the person in custody is greatest.

The method for a student is to ask two questions in order — how many days of police custody have been taken, and how many days of detention in total — and never to answer the first with the figure that belongs to the second.

Use it in any question on remand, on the powers of the Magistrate under BNSS s. 187 (CrPC s. 167), or on default bail, where the sixty or ninety day figure has to be distinguished from the fifteen.

It disposes of the claim that police custody may be spread across the whole investigation period. It does not decide anything about the grant of bail on the merits, nor about the consequences of a failure to file the report in time, which is the separate subject of default bail.

State the change expressly. The decision was given on the 1973 Code. Under BNSS s. 187 the fifteen days of police custody may be taken in parts, within the first forty days or sixty days of the total detention period, according to the gravity of the offence — so the total of fifteen days survives, but the rule that it must all be taken at the beginning does not. An answer that states Anupam Kulkarni without this qualification states the position as it was before 1 July 2024.