Citation: Abdul Rajik v. State of M.P., 2026 INSC 1001 (Supreme Court of India, decided September 16, 2026)
Two men were convicted of carrying drugs, sentenced to years in prison, and lost their appeal in the High Court too. Twelve years later, the Supreme Court has acquitted both of them — not because anyone proved they were innocent, but because the evidence trail supposedly proving their guilt had a gap nobody could explain.
In 2004, police in Madhya Pradesh stopped two men, Abdul Rajik and Govind, who were allegedly carrying bags containing charas (a cannabis derivative). The substances weighed roughly 1 kg and 800 grams respectively. On the spot, the arresting officer identified the material as charas simply by burning a small piece of it and going by how it looked and smelled. Samples were later sent for lab testing, which confirmed it was charas. Based on this, a trial court convicted both men, sentencing them to 8 and 10 years in prison — and the High Court upheld this in 2010. The case then sat in the Supreme Court for another 12 years before finally being decided.
The Problem: Where Were the Samples for 5 Days?
This is where the case falls apart. Police paperwork showed the drug samples were sent off to the forensic lab on 1st December, 2004. But the lab’s own report says it only received them on 6th December — a full five days later. Nobody — not the police officer who handled them, not the record-keeper, not a single witness — could explain where the samples actually were during that gap, or who had custody of them. The constable who supposedly carried them to the lab was never even called to testify.
On top of this, the sample packets themselves had no signatures, seals, or identifying marks tying them back to the specific accused — and neither did the lab’s own paperwork.
Why “Burning It” Doesn’t Count as Proof
The Court also took direct aim at the officer’s on-the-spot method of identifying the drug — testing it by setting a piece on fire. There’s simply no accepted scientific basis for identifying a specific narcotic substance this way, the Court noted. Without a properly conducted, properly documented lab test to rely on, that in-the-field “test” carried no evidentiary weight at all.
The Legal Principle at Play
Under Indian drug law, there’s a specific safeguard — Section 52-A of the NDPS Act — requiring that samples from seized narcotics be drawn in front of a Magistrate, who then certifies exactly what was seized and sampled. This exists precisely to prevent situations like this one, where samples can go missing, get mixed up, or be tampered with along the way. Here, this step was skipped entirely. Combined with the unexplained 5-day gap, the Court held that the chain of custody had been completely broken — meaning the lab report confirming the drug’s identity couldn’t be trusted or relied upon at all.
Once the lab report was thrown out, there was no other reliable evidence left proving the seized substance was actually charas in the first place — a basic requirement for the conviction to stand. With that foundation gone, the Supreme Court set aside both convictions and acquitted the two men entirely.
This case is a clean, real-world example of a principle most people only associate with crime dramas — “chain of custody” — actually deciding a serious criminal case. In law, physical evidence isn’t just about what was found; it’s equally about proving, step by step, that nothing happened to it along the way.
