The Cheque Was Signed. Was the Loan?
Every cheque bounce trial has two documents at its heart, even when only one of them is named in the complaint. The cheque proves that a payment was promised. Something else has to prove why. When the complainant says that "something else" is a handwritten receipt or undertaking, that paper quietly becomes the most important exhibit in the case, and it is also the one that trial courts most often look past. This is the story of an application in which the trial court answered the question we did not care much about and left unanswered the one we did, and of how the High Court set that right in a single hearing.
The case in brief
The complainant instituted a complaint under Section 138 of the Negotiable Instruments Act, 1881, before the Ld. JMFC (NI Act)-04, South District, Saket Courts, alleging that he had advanced a cash loan to my client and that the cheque in question was issued towards its repayment. To establish the underlying debt, he relied on a receipt cum undertaking said to have been executed by my client at the time of the loan, bearing my client's signature and that of a single attesting witness. It was exhibited as Ex. CW-1/A on 20.09.2024. My client's defence, from the very first stage of the trial, has been that his signatures were obtained on blank paper and the document was completed later.
After the defence evidence, we moved an application seeking that two documents be sent to the Government Forensic Science Laboratory. Prayer (a) concerned the cheque: whether the particulars and the signature were made by the same person, and the approximate time gap between them. Prayer (b) concerned the receipt cum undertaking: whether the signatures of the executant and of the sole attesting witness were affixed at or about the same point in time or on separate occasions.
By order dated 11.08.2026, the Ld. Trial Court dismissed the application. The order dealt with the cheque, and only the cheque. Prayer (b) found no discussion and no finding.
We approached the High Court of Delhi under Section 528 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023. By order dated 15.09.2026 in Karan Mongia v. Ravi Gaur & Anr., CRL.M.C. 6832/2026, Hon'ble Mr. Justice Saurabh Banerjee dispensed with notice to the respondent and remanded the proceedings to the Ld. JMFC for the limited purpose of adjudicating prayer (b).
The cheque was never the real battleground
It would be dishonest to write this piece without admitting that prayer (a) was always the weaker limb, and that is why we did not pursue it before the High Court.
Once a drawer admits his signature on a cheque, the law gives very little room to argue about who filled in the rest. Section 20 of the NI Act treats a person who signs and delivers a blank or incomplete instrument as having given prima facie authority to the holder to complete it. The Supreme Court in Bir Singh v. Mukesh Kumar went further and held that a signed blank cheque voluntarily handed over attracts the presumption under Section 139 even if the particulars were filled in by someone else, and that a handwriting expert's opinion on who wrote the body of the cheque is, by itself, largely immaterial. The Ld. Trial Court's reasoning on the cheque ran along these lines. Arguing against it would have spent credibility we needed for the point that mattered.
The document that carries the debt
The receipt cum undertaking stands on entirely different footing. It is not a negotiable instrument, so Section 20 does not reach it, and no statutory presumption attaches to its contents. Its execution, and the circumstances of its execution, have to be proved like any other private document.
This matters because the presumption under Sections 118 and 139 is rebuttable, and the bar for rebuttal is modest. In Kumar Exports v. Sharma Carpets, the Supreme Court held that the accused need not disprove the debt beyond reasonable doubt; he may rely on the complainant's own material and on circumstances, and a probable defence on the preponderance of probabilities is enough to shift the burden back. Basalingappa v. Mudibasappa restated the same principles and emphasised that the burden on the accused is evidentiary, not persuasive.
Now consider a case where the complainant pleads a cash loan and offers a single written acknowledgment as its proof. If that acknowledgment is shown to have been assembled on separate occasions rather than executed in one sitting before the witness, the complainant's version of a specific loan on a specific day loses its footing, and the accused's probable defence gains real weight. The undertaking is, in substance, the document said to establish the legally enforceable debt. Declining to test it is not a minor procedural slip. It closes the door on the one objective means the accused has to reach the preponderance threshold.
Ask the laboratory a question it can answer
Trial courts are sceptical of forensic applications in cheque cases, and often with reason. The usual refusal rests on the proposition that the age of ink cannot be conclusively determined, and that even if an expert says one ink is older than another, the actual date of signing remains unknown. That view has respectable support. The Andhra Pradesh High Court in Kambala Nageswara Rao v. Kesana Balakrishna cautioned that the age of ink may say little about when a signature was made, since ink or a pen may be manufactured years before it is used. Other High Courts have taken a more receptive view and directed disputed documents to facilities that undertake such examination, as in G.V. Rami Reddy v. D. Mohan Raju (Andhra Pradesh). The science, and the case law, remain genuinely unsettled.
The lesson from the drafting is therefore about framing. Prayer (b) did not ask the laboratory to date the ink. It asked a relative question: were the two signatures on the same page affixed at or about the same time, or on different occasions? That is a narrower and more answerable question, and it goes directly to the complainant's own case that the document was signed by the executant in the witness's presence at the moment the money changed hands. The narrower the question you put to the expert, the harder it is for the court to dismiss it as speculative.
Fair trial includes the right to test the evidence
The accused's right to lead defence evidence, including expert evidence on a disputed document, is part of the guarantee of a fair trial. In Kalyani Baskar v. M.S. Sampoornam, the Supreme Court held that a Magistrate who declines to send a disputed cheque for expert examination, where it could furnish material to rebut the complainant's case, deprives the accused of a fair opportunity, observing that adducing evidence in defence is a valuable right. T. Nagappa v. Y.R. Muralidhar followed that view in a case where the accused alleged misuse of a cheque.
The right is not unqualified. In G. Someshwar Rao v. Samineni Nageshwar Rao, the Court reiterated that such an application must serve the cause of justice and not be a device for delay, and that the Magistrate retains discretion. The statutory framework supports both sides of that balance: the court's power to summon evidence essential to a just decision now sits in Section 348 of the BNSS (formerly Section 311 CrPC), expert opinion is relevant under Section 39 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023 (formerly Section 45 of the Evidence Act), and reports of government scientific experts are receivable under Section 329 of the BNSS (formerly Section 293 CrPC). None of this compels a court to allow every forensic application. It does compel the court to consider it.
A dismissal must answer every prayer
That was the real flaw in the impugned order, and it is why the High Court's intervention was swift. An application with two distinct prayers, directed at two different documents resting on two different legal footings, cannot be disposed of by reasoning that addresses only one. The logic of Section 20 and of an admitted signature on a cheque says nothing about a private undertaking. An order silent on an independent relief is, to that extent, no order at all on that relief. The requirement that judicial orders disclose reasons is well settled; the Supreme Court in Kranti Associates (P) Ltd. v. Masood Ahmed Khan described reasons as the very foundation of fair decision making and a safeguard against arbitrariness.
On the choice of remedy: an order declining to send documents for forensic examination is interlocutory, and the revisional bar under Section 438(2) of the BNSS (formerly Section 397(2) CrPC) makes revision an uncertain route. The inherent jurisdiction under Section 528 was the appropriate one. The Supreme Court in Prabhu Chawla v. State of Rajasthan confirmed that the bar on revision against interlocutory orders does not curtail the High Court's inherent power where interference is necessary to secure the ends of justice.
It is worth noting what the High Court did not do. It did not direct that the undertaking be sent to the laboratory, and it expressed no view on the merits of prayer (b). It remanded the question to the Ld. JMFC to be decided. That is the correct and restrained course, and it is also why the relief could be granted without notice at the first hearing.
Candour is a strategy
Our petition, as filed, had sought the setting aside of the entire order and the allowing of the whole application, with remand as an alternative. At the hearing, I told the Court candidly that we did not challenge the findings on the cheque and restricted our grievance to the non-consideration of the undertaking. The order records that concession.
Narrowing the grievance did two things. It turned a contestable challenge on the merits into an unanswerable point about an unaddressed prayer. And it made notice to the other side unnecessary, because nothing decided against the complainant was being disturbed. A petition that asks for everything invites a counter affidavit and a date six weeks away. A petition that asks for exactly what the order failed to do can be disposed of the same day.
The takeaway
For those drafting such applications: keep your prayers severable and precise, each directed at a single document and a single question. If the cheque and the underlying acknowledgment are both in issue, treat them as the distinct legal animals they are, and say why Section 20 cannot rescue the second. Frame the forensic question as narrowly as the facts allow.
For those reading an adverse order: read it against your prayer clause, line by line, before you read its reasoning. The ground of challenge is sometimes not what the court said, but what it did not say. And when you go up, be prepared to give up the arguments you cannot win. The court will trust you with the one you can.
Acknowledgment
The petition was drafted by my colleague, Mr. R. Jude Rohit, Advocate, who also assisted me throughout the matter. Much of the clarity in how the two prayers were separated, and why the undertaking stood apart from the cheque, is owed to his work.
The order dated 15.09.2026 passed by the Hon'ble High Court of Delhi in CRL.M.C. 6832/2026 is attached for the readers.
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