Supreme Court quashes NEET protest FIRs under Article 142, CJP drops 5 September march

The Supreme Court on 1 September used Article 142 to quash first information reports filed against students who joined the Cockroach Janta Party protests between 20 and 25 July. The three-judge bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant, Justice Joymalya Bagchi and Justice V. Mohana said the cases should not follow the young people into their careers. CJP co-convener Saurav Das then told the court the group was calling off its 5 September march from India Gate to Delhi Police Headquarters.

The applications that opened the door came from Delhi Police and from Maharashtra, Bihar, West Bengal and Assam. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the bench the Centre wanted the FIRs closed except for a list of 2,873 people who, the police said, carried records for murder, rape or abduction and had been present at Jantar Mantar. The court allowed one fresh FIR against that list, without prejudice to those persons seeking their own remedies.

Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh had also registered cases but had not joined the applications. The bench closed that gap. Any FIR tied to the same protest dates in any state or Union Territory, it said, shall not be pursued or investigated and shall be treated as closed. It also told states and Union Territories not to register fresh FIRs for the July incidents. The order recorded that taking part in a protest, by itself, is not an offence.

What Article 142 did here

Article 142 lets the court pass orders it thinks necessary to do complete justice in a matter before it. The bench said it was using that power because of the future of protesters who had come in good faith, and because both sides had given undertakings in court. It added a limit that is easy to miss in the headlines: the order is confined to these facts and is not a binding precedent for other protest cases.

The same order told the Centre to work out, with states and Union Territories, a standing method for compensating protesters injured by police action. That scheme, once written, is to be used as a regular tool rather than a one-off. Separately, the court directed the Union to pay, within three months, the families of students who died by suicide after the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak. Mehta had already told the court the government accepted that duty and wanted three months to set the rules.

CJP had spent the last week of August preparing a march that would have tested Delhi's willingness to keep cases alive. Das and other organisers treated the 1 September hearing as the moment to trade the street for the order. Outside court they called the result historic. Inside, the language was colder. The bench gave credit to both sides for the compromise and then wrote the exceptions that keep 2,873 names in play.

What remains open

Three files are still live. The first is the single Delhi FIR against the 2,873. The second is the compensation scheme for injured protesters, which the Centre must design and the states must adopt. The third is the three-month clock on payments to families of students who died after the leak. None of those files is small. The 2,873 list, if it is accurate, mixes people the police call dangerous with people who may only have been nearby. Those individuals can still move the court. The compensation scheme will be judged by whether money actually reaches families in states that did not join Tuesday's applications.

The July protests began as a demand that then Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resign over the paper leak. They spread from Delhi to several states. FIRs followed in BJP-ruled and opposition-ruled capitals alike. That is why the court's choice to extend the quashing beyond the five applicants matters. A student in Lucknow or Bhopal who never saw the Delhi application still walks out from under those July cases.

The political reading writes itself and is not the useful one. The useful one is narrower. A national exam leak produced suicides, a street movement, a stack of FIRs, and then a court-managed settlement in which the Union and four states asked for the cases to die. The court agreed, kept a criminal-record carve-out, and put a clock on money for the families. Whether that settlement holds will be visible by early December, when the three months run out.