Delhi court convicts Sukesh Chandrasekhar for posing as a Supreme Court judge

Chief Judicial Magistrate Harshita Mishra of Tis Hazari convicted Sukesh Chandrasekhar on 20 August for impersonating a sitting Supreme Court judge and trying to force a trial judge to grant him bail. The offences are IPC Sections 170 (personating a public servant), 189 (threat of injury to a public servant) and 507 (criminal intimidation by anonymous communication). Arguments on sentence are listed for 27 August. Chandrasekhar has already asked the Delhi High Court to set the conviction aside. That petition is listed for 31 August before Justice Madhu Jain.

The case is FIR 100/2017 at Subzi Mandi police station. On 28 April 2017 Chandrasekhar was in police custody in a separate corruption matter. Prosecutors say he used constable Manjeet’s mobile phone to call Special Judge Poonam Chaudhary, who was hearing that case. The first voice on the line claimed to be the private secretary of a Supreme Court judge. A second voice then came on, claimed to be the judge, invoked the Union Home Ministry and the Collegium, demanded immediate interim bail and threatened career harm if she refused.

The sentence the court wrote

Mishra’s judgment, quoted by The Indian Express, treated the call as an attack on the court rather than a routine fraud. “He operated under the dangerous belief that if a lie is only grand enough and uttered with sufficient audacity, the rule of law will simply bow its head and step aside,” she wrote. Impersonating a bureaucrat or a political fixer, she said, is a crime of greed. Impersonating a Supreme Court judge or his secretary is “an act of institutional defiance.”

“He assumed the judiciary would respond with the same quiet compliance as his other corporate targets,” she added. “The judiciary does not negotiate its authority with shadow callers.”

The same order called the Delhi Police investigation “superficial” and “shoddy.” Officers did not recover the phone, did not pull CCTV from the Crime Branch premises, did not collect key call records in time and delayed witness examinations. Mishra directed the police to look at constable Manjeet’s role and said that direction was not a finding of guilt against him.

What the defence is asking for

Advocate Anant Malik told the High Court that Chandrasekhar has already spent about eight years in custody on an offence whose maximum term is two years. He argues there is no physical phone and no recording, and that remarks in the trial judgment go beyond the record. The petition asks for the conviction to be quashed, for those remarks to be expunged and for sentencing to be stayed while the High Court hears the case.

Chaudhary did not grant the bail the caller wanted. The 2017 attempt failed on the day it was made. The conviction arrives nine years later, with the trial court saying the police file was thin and the accused saying the process was stacked. The 27 August sentencing hearing and the 31 August High Court date will decide whether the conviction stands long enough to produce a term, or whether the case returns to the argument about a missing phone.