Journalist Abhishek Upadhyay Who Exposed Ram Mandir Donation Irregularities Moves Supreme Court Against FIR
(By Syed Ali Taher Abedi)
New Delhi, August 23, 2026 –A journalist who was among the first in the country to report allegations of theft and financial irregularities in the donation corpus of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya one of the most politically sensitive investigative beats in contemporary India has approached the Supreme Court of India seeking to quash an FIR registered against him in Ghaziabad, alleging that the criminal complaint is a fabricated instrument of harassment designed to punish him for his investigative journalism and to silence reporting that powerful interests in Uttar Pradesh find deeply inconvenient.
The petition filed by Abhishek Upadhyay presents the Supreme Court with a case that sits at the intersection of press freedom, investigative journalism, alleged police misconduct, and the constitutional guarantee of free speech a case whose implications extend well beyond the immediate fate of one journalist and into the question of whether reporters who investigate powerful institutions in Uttar Pradesh can do so without fear of reprisal through the mechanisms of state law enforcement.
The FIR: A Road-Rage Complaint That the Journalist Says Never Happened
The FIR against Upadhyay was registered at the Indirapuram Police Station in Ghaziabad on August 18, 2026. According to the complaint, a motorcycle ridden by one person was allegedly hit by a Baleno car near Shipra Mall, and the complainant alleged that the driver abused and threatened him after the incident naming Upadhyay in connection with the car.
Upadhyay’s account of events on August 18 is diametrically opposed to the complainant’s version in every material particular.
He says that while returning from his daughter’s school on August 18, a motorcycle-borne person approached his car near Shipra Mall and created a commotion.
He claims there was no collision or physical confrontation and that he left the spot without engaging in a fight specifically because his daughter was with him in the car.
The detail about his daughter’s presence is not merely a personal aside. It is a factual submission directed at the plausibility of the FIR’s allegations the argument being that a father returning from his daughter’s school, with the child in the vehicle, is an unlikely candidate for the kind of aggressive road-rage confrontation described in the complaint.
It is the kind of detail whose truth or falsity is capable of objective verification and whose significance the Supreme Court will be required to weigh as it considers whether the FIR discloses a genuine cognisable offence or a constructed pretext for criminal harassment.
The Discrepancy in the Bike Number: A Forensic Crack in the Complaint
Upadhyay has contended that there is a discrepancy in the registered number of the motorcycle referred to in the complaint.
Though the FIR refers to a Splendour bike, the number mentioned in the complaint belongs to a different motorcycle entirely.
The registration number of a vehicle is, in the context of an FIR concerning a road-rage incident, not a peripheral detail.
It is the primary forensic identifier linking a specific motorcycle to the alleged incident and a discrepancy between the type of vehicle described and the registration number cited in the FIR is a factual inconsistency that goes to the foundational reliability of the complaint.
If the registration number in the FIR belongs to a vehicle other than the Splendour motorcycle described by the complainant, the question of how the complaint was constructed and by whom, and with what degree of factual accuracy becomes a matter of urgent investigative interest that the petition places squarely before the Supreme Court.
The CCTV Allegation: Evidence Being Suppressed, the Journalist Says
The most alarming factual allegation in the petition and the one that most directly implicates the conduct of law enforcement officers rather than merely the complainant concerns the handling of CCTV footage from the vicinity of Shipra Mall.
Upadhyay has alleged that police personnel approached shops near the alleged site of the incident and pressured shopkeepers to delete or withhold CCTV footage of what occurred near Shipra Mall on August 18.
He has urged the Supreme Court to direct the preservation of CCTV footage and other electronic evidence.
The allegation of police officers approaching private shopkeepers and pressuring them to delete or withhold surveillance footage in connection with a criminal case is, if accurate, an act of evidence destruction of the gravest character.
CCTV footage is objective, contemporaneous, and unmediated evidence the kind of evidence that can either confirm or definitively disprove the accounts of both the complainant and the accused.
A law enforcement apparatus that seeks the destruction of such evidence rather than its preservation has abandoned its investigative function and assumed a prosecutorial posture before the investigation has even been completed.
The Supreme Court’s directions in its series of judgments on the preservation of electronic evidence including directions specifically concerning CCTV footage make the alleged police conduct, if true, not merely a criminal act but a contemptuous one.
The Non-Supply of the FIR: A Violation of Supreme Court’s Own Directions
Upadhyay has stated that the complete FIR was not supplied to him despite repeated requests, and that the FIR has not been uploaded on the relevant website as required by the Supreme Court’s directions in the Youth Bar Association case.
The Supreme Court’s directions in Youth Bar Association of India v. Union of India which mandated the online publication of FIRs within twenty-four hours of their registration, subject to specified exceptions represent one of the apex court’s most practically significant transparency directions in the domain of criminal procedure.
The failure to upload the FIR within the mandated period, combined with the refusal to supply a copy to the accused despite repeated requests, places the UP Police’s conduct in this case in direct conflict with the Supreme Court’s own binding directions a circumstance that the bench receiving the petition will note with particular attention.
The Midnight Visit: Police at the Journalist’s Home While He Was Away
The episode that appears to have precipitated Upadhyay’s immediate approach to the Supreme Court bypassing the Allahabad High Court — is not the FIR itself but what followed it.
According to the petition, a police team of around a dozen personnel visited his residence at night on August 20 while he was away.
His wife and two daughters were reportedly at home at the time of the visit.
Upadhyay says the incident left him fearing imminent arrest and further coercive action.
The descent of a dozen police officers upon a journalist’s home in his absence, at night, with only his wife and young children present is an act whose character goes well beyond the ordinary conduct of a road-rage investigation.
A dozen officers is a deployment associated with the arrest of a serious criminal, not the investigation of an alleged minor traffic altercation.
The timing at night, when the journalist himself was not home, ensuring that his wife and children bore the full psychological impact of the arrival is a detail consistent with intimidation rather than investigation.
The petition characterises this visit as having left Upadhyay fearing imminent arrest and it is this fear, he tells the Supreme Court, that made his immediate approach to the apex court without first exhausting his remedy before the Allahabad High Court both necessary and constitutionally justified.
The Investigative Context: A Journalist Who Reported What Others Did Not
The petition links the criminal action against Upadhyay directly to his investigative reporting on alleged corruption and irregularities in Uttar Pradesh, including his recent reports on the Ram Temple donation controversy and allegations involving government officials and departments.
The Ram Temple donation controversy the subject of the writ petition filed before the Supreme Court by another petitioner earlier this year, which sought a CBI-led investigation into alleged financial irregularities in the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Teerth Kshetra Trust is among the most politically sensitive investigative subjects in contemporary India.
The Trust manages the construction and administration of the Ram Temple at Ayodhya a project funded by the voluntary contributions of millions of ordinary Indians across the country, whose faith in the integrity of the institution they donated to is the foundation of the entire fund-raising enterprise.
A journalist who reports credibly on alleged theft and financial irregularities in that corpus is performing a public service of the highest constitutional importance.
He is bringing to the citizenry’s attention information about the use of funds that were given not to the state but to a quasi-public institution in an act of collective religious devotion.
The public’s interest in knowing whether those funds have been honestly applied is as legitimate as their interest in any other exercise of public or quasi-public financial responsibility.
Whether Upadhyay’s reporting on the Ram Temple donations was accurate or inaccurate a question that is for the institutions of investigative accountability, not the criminal courts, to determine is not the question before the Supreme Court.
The question is whether the FIR registered against him on August 18 is a genuine criminal complaint arising from a genuine road-rage incident, or a manufactured pretext whose real purpose is to expose a journalist with the anatomy of a criminal case while simultaneously creating a chilling effect on his and others’ continued investigation into the matters he has been reporting.
The Relief Sought: Quashing, Protection, and the CBI Alternative
Upadhyay has sought the quashing of the FIR as his primary relief, along with protection from arrest and other coercive action in the interim.
As an alternative relief, he has sought an investigation by an agency other than the Uttar Pradesh Police, including the CBI.
He has told the Supreme Court that he is willing to cooperate fully with any lawful investigation.
The alternative prayer for a CBI investigation or investigation by any agency independent of the Uttar Pradesh Police is the most constitutionally significant relief in the petition.
It reflects a submission that the very police force whose officers are alleged to have pressured shopkeepers to delete CCTV evidence cannot be trusted to conduct an impartial investigation into the underlying complaint.
Where the investigating agency is itself the alleged perpetrator of evidence destruction, its continued control over the investigation is a constitutional affront and the transfer of investigation to an independent agency is the only remedy that can restore the integrity of the criminal process.
The Constitutional Framework: Press Freedom, Article 19, and the Chilling Effect
The case of Abhishek Upadhyay joins a lengthening list of cases in which journalists who have investigated sensitive subjects in Uttar Pradesh have found themselves the recipients of criminal complaints shortly after their reporting.
Each individual case presents its own factual matrix and each must be judged on its own evidence.
But the pattern itself is one that the Supreme Court has been increasingly called upon to examine, and one whose systemic implications for press freedom under Article 19(1)(a) of the Constitution cannot be assessed by looking at any single complaint in isolation.
The constitutional doctrine of the chilling effect holds that the threat of criminal prosecution even an ultimately unsuccessful prosecution is capable of deterring journalists from pursuing investigations in the public interest, precisely because the process of criminal defence is itself costly, time-consuming, and professionally damaging regardless of its ultimate outcome.
An investigative journalist who must choose between pursuing a sensitive story and protecting himself from criminal exposure is a journalist whose constitutional freedom of speech has been materially curtailed not by censorship in the traditional sense, but by the deployment of the criminal process as an instrument of selective deterrence.
The Supreme Court of India has, across a series of landmark judgments, recognised the constitutional significance of this doctrine and has developed, through the exercise of its jurisdiction under Articles 32 and 226, a body of precedent governing the circumstances in which FIRs targeting journalists may be quashed as constitutionally impermissible exercises of state power against the freedom of the press.
Whether the FIR against Abhishek Upadhyay falls within that category will be determined by the bench that takes up his petition but the constitutional framework within which that determination must be made is one that places the press freedom question at its centre, not its periphery.
What the Supreme Court Must Now Determine
When the petition comes before the bench, the court will be required to address several questions in sequence.
Does the FIR, read on its face, disclose the commission of a cognisable offence?
Does the discrepancy in the motorcycle registration number cast sufficient doubt on the complaint’s authenticity to warrant immediate interim protection?
Does the allegation of police-directed CCTV deletion warrant an immediate preservation order and inquiry?
And does the linkage between the journalist’s investigative reporting and the timing of the FIR disclose a pattern of conduct that the court should examine as a possible exercise of state power against press freedom?
These are the questions that will determine not merely the immediate fate of Abhishek Upadhyay’s criminal exposure, but the constitutional signal that the Supreme Court of India chooses to send to the journalists of Uttar Pradesh and beyond about the protection that the Constitution extends to those who pursue uncomfortable truths through the methods of independent investigative journalism.
