Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 — back to Table of Contents
Section 18A. No enquiry or approval required
(1) For the purposes of this Act,—
- (a) preliminary enquiry shall not be required for registration of a First Information Report against any person; or
- (b) the investigating officer shall not require approval for the arrest, if necessary, of any person, against whom an accusation of having committed an offence under this Act has been made and no procedure other than that provided under this Act or the Code shall apply.
(2) The provisions of section 438 of the Code shall not apply to a case under this Act, notwithstanding any judgment or order or direction of any Court.
Note: This section was inserted by the Scheduled Castes and the Scheduled Tribes (Prevention of Atrocities) Amendment Act, 2018 (Act 27 of 2018), with effect from 20 August 2018, to nullify certain safeguards laid down by the Supreme Court in Subhash Kashinath Mahajan v. State of Maharashtra (2018) — which had required a preliminary enquiry before FIR registration and prior approval before arrest. Its constitutional validity was upheld by the Supreme Court in Prithvi Raj Chauhan v. Union of India (2020), after the Court’s own three-judge bench had separately reviewed and substantially withdrawn the Mahajan directions in Union of India v. State of Maharashtra (2019).
