India’s Supreme Court has quashed the police complaints filed against students who protested in July over irregularities in the NEET-UG medical entrance examination, and barred the registration of further ones arising from the same events.

A three-judge bench headed by the Chief Justice held that this was a fit case to invoke the court’s extraordinary powers under Article 142 of the Constitution, citing the future prospects of young people who had participated in good faith in peaceful protest.

The applications were brought by the police and by several state governments — that is, by the prosecuting side asking the court to end its own cases.

What Article 142 is

Article 142 empowers the Supreme Court of India to pass any order necessary to do “complete justice” in a matter before it. It has no direct equivalent in most other constitutions.

Ordinarily a court applies the law to facts and grants remedies the law provides. Article 142 lets India’s apex court shape a remedy the ordinary law does not supply, where the judges consider that following the usual route would produce an unjust outcome.

It is not unlimited. The court has repeatedly held that the power cannot be used to override express statutory provisions, and the existence of the power does not mean any criminal complaint can be swept away. Judges must justify its use against the specific facts.

Here they did so, and added a further limit: the bench stated the order was passed on the peculiar facts and circumstances of the case and is not to be treated as a precedent. That sentence is the court telling future litigants not to cite this.

What the court did not do

The order is narrower than the headline suggests, and the distinction matters.

The court permitted the registration of a fresh complaint against 2,873 individuals identified by Delhi Police, whose alleged roles in offences involving bodily harm or destruction of property are to be investigated.

So the relief runs to people who protested peacefully and now face a police record that would follow them into professional life. It does not extend to those the police say committed violence. That is a coherent line, and it is roughly the line the court’s own reasoning implies: the objection was to criminalising participation, not to prosecuting conduct.

The bench also recorded the Solicitor General’s undertaking that a nationwide policy will be formulated within three months to compensate the families of students who died by suicide in connection with the examination’s cancellation.

The part that is not really about law

The Solicitor General told the court that the applications were filed in pursuance of promises the central government made to protest leaders in July: that cases would be withdrawn and no further complaints registered. The court also recorded that a protest planned for 5 September had been withdrawn.

What that describes is a negotiated settlement between a government and a protest movement, brought to the Supreme Court to be given legal effect.

Supporters of the approach would say this is exactly what Article 142 is for: a route to finality that ordinary procedure could not deliver quickly across multiple states, ending thousands of cases at once and defusing a confrontation.

Critics have argued for years that Article 142 lets the court act as an administrator rather than an adjudicator, and that using it to ratify a political bargain — with a planned protest called off in the same hearing — puts the judiciary in the position of guaranteeing deals rather than deciding disputes. The “not a precedent” line suggests the bench was conscious of the objection.

Why an entrance exam produced this

For readers outside India, the scale needs explaining. NEET-UG is the single national entrance examination for undergraduate medical courses, taken by well over two million candidates competing for a far smaller number of places. For most, there is no alternative route into medicine.

An allegation that the paper leaked therefore does not read as an administrative failure. It reads as the destruction of a year of a young person’s life, in a system where the year matters enormously and families have often spent heavily on preparation.

That is the background against which protests spread across multiple states in July, and against which a court weighed criminal records against future prospects and chose the prospects.

What to watch

Whether the compensation policy appears inside the three months the court recorded, and what happens to the investigation of the 2,873. Undertakings given to a court are enforceable in a way that promises given to protest leaders are not — which is, in the end, the practical reason this went before judges at all.

Sources

• Supreme Court of India order, reported 1–2 September 2026
• LiveLaw and SCC Online reports of the bench’s directions
• Outlook India explainer on Article 142
• Article 142, Constitution of India