Introduction
"Abuse of process of law" is one of the more elastic phrases in Indian criminal procedure — a ground courts reach for when a prosecution, technically still alive on the record, no longer serves any real purpose the criminal law is meant to serve. Two recent Rajasthan High Court orders, both authored by Justice Anoop Kumar Dhand within weeks of each other in 2026, invoke the doctrine to quash proceedings arising out of matrimonial disputes — but they get there by two quite different routes, and reading them together is more instructive than reading either alone.
The First Route: A Statutory Bar Dressed as a Factual Dispute
In R v. State of Rajasthan & Anr. (2026 LiveLaw (Raj) 319), a woman filed an FIR against her husband nearly four years into their marriage — a year after the birth of their daughter — alleging he had used drugs, medicines and black magic to induce the marriage and had thereafter raped her. The Court quashed the FIR primarily on a point of law: Exception 2 to Section 375 IPC excludes sexual intercourse between a husband and wife from the definition of rape, and the marriage itself was not in dispute. Whatever the truth of the inducement allegations, the core charge could not survive the statutory exception. The multi-year delay before the complaint, spanning voluntary cohabitation and a child's birth, reinforced the Court's view that the proceedings did not reflect a concealed crime brought promptly to light.
Here, "abuse of process" functions almost as a label applied after the fact to what is really a straightforward legal bar — the prosecution could not succeed on the facts as pleaded, given the statutory exception, regardless of anyone's intentions in filing it.
The Second Route: Conduct After the Fact
In Satyapal Sharma & Anr. v. State of Rajasthan & Anr. (2026 LiveLaw (Raj) 233), the reasoning is different in kind. A wife had filed a dowry-harassment complaint against her husband and in-laws in 2018. While it was pending, the couple negotiated a mutual-consent divorce and a ₹20 lakh permanent alimony settlement — but the criminal case itself was never withdrawn, and the complainant did not appear to give evidence. The Court quashed the proceedings not because the original allegations were legally barred, but because of what happened afterward: accepting a substantial settlement and a mutual divorce while leaving a live criminal case hanging over the petitioners, without pursuing it, read to the Court as using the prosecution as leverage rather than as a genuine grievance.
This is abuse of process in its more classical sense — not a defect in the complaint at the time it was filed, but a later pattern of conduct that reveals the proceedings are no longer being used for what criminal law is for.
Reading the Two Together
Neither order breaks new doctrinal ground on its own; both routes to a quashing order — a statutory bar, and post-settlement conduct — are well established in Indian criminal procedure. What the pairing usefully illustrates is that "abuse of process" is doing different analytical work in each case. In the first, it is close to a formality, since the case could not have proceeded on the facts regardless of the parties' conduct. In the second, it is the entire basis for relief: nothing about the original 2018 complaint was legally defective, and the outcome turns entirely on how the complainant behaved once she had already been compensated and released from the marriage. For practitioners assessing whether a quashing petition is likely to succeed, that distinction — a defect in the complaint itself, versus a change in the complainant's own position after settlement — is often the more useful question than simply pleading "abuse of process" as a slogan.
Further Reading
Full case summaries are available on NyayVidhan: R v. State of Rajasthan & Anr. and Satyapal Sharma & Anr. v. State of Rajasthan & Anr.
For the wider case law, see our guide to quashing criminal cases under Section 482 CrPC and Section 528 BNSS.
