The 24-Hour Rule: How SC Drew the Line Between Arrest and Detention

The SC judgment is a blow against the widespread practice of 'screening' arrest, writes Areeb Uddin Ahmed.

The Supreme Court held that the 18-hour gap between the conclusion of seizure and formal arrest was, by itself, unreasonable within the meaning of Section 58 BNSS.

(Image: The Quint/Arnica Kala)

In a judgment that will reshape the everyday practice of criminal arrest across the country, the Supreme Court, in Sujit Das v Union of India, ruled on 5 November that the 24-hour deadline under Article 22(2) of the Constitution runs from the moment a person's liberty is effectively curtailed—and not from the time police formally record an arrest.

A Division Bench of Justices Ujjal Bhuyan and Atul S Chandurkar held that: 

"The dichotomy that the period of 24 hours for the purposes of clause (2) of Article 22 commences from the completion of such search and seizure and only from the time of arrest recorded by the arresting authority is not only unsustainable in law but is entirely unconstitutional."

The Court expressly disapproved contrary views of the Orissa, Madras and Kerala High Courts, approved the Kerala High Court's decision in Biswajit Mandal (2025), and ordered the immediate release of four accused charged under the Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances (NDPS) Act. The four had been detained at 2 pm on 29 September 2025, but shown as formally arrested at 11 am the next day.

The judgment is a direct blow against the widespread investigative practice of "screening" arrest, i.e. holding suspects in informal custody for interrogation while the clock on constitutional protection is made to start late.

The Case On Ground

The case arose from a Customs Preventive Force operation in Tripura.

Acting on secret information, officers intercepted a truck at Shanitala Noabadi on 29 September 2025, at about 2 pm, and recovered 11.03 kg of methamphetamine (Yaba) tablets, with a further 49.76 kg recovered later at the Customs office. The search and seizure were completed by 5 pm.

Yet the four accused were formally arrested only at 11:00-11:15 am on 30 September, roughly 18 hours after the seizure concluded and produced before the magistrate at 4:45 pm that day, which was within 24 hours of the recorded arrest but well beyond 24 hours of their actual detention.

The investigating officer's affidavit defended this on the ground that the intervening hours were needed to complete statutory formalities under the NDPS Act—search and seizure, weighing, sampling, interrogation to trace the supply chain, and administrative delays.

The Additional Solicitor General argued that "detention for the purpose of search" under Sections 42 and 43 of the NDPS Act is a temporary restraint that does not trigger Article 22(2), and that the 24-hour period could at the earliest run from the conclusion of search and seizure at 5 pm on 29 September. 

The Court rejected both formulations, treating 2 pm on 29 September as the point of detention. It also found the production at 4:45 pm on 30 September to be a clear breach of Article 22(2), vitiating the arrest and rendering continued detention illegal. It further held that the 18-hour gap between the conclusion of seizure and formal arrest was, by itself, unreasonable within the meaning of Section 58 BNSS.

The Supreme Court Ruling

The doctrinal heart of the judgment lies in its reading of the phrase "arrested and detained in custody" in Article 22(2). The Court emphasised that the expression is conjunctive, not disjunctive. It was held as follows:

"The expression being joint and conjunctive, the two words appearing therein would mean one and the same thing. This is because the Constitution does not recognise any detention divorced from arrest."

Consequently, the 24-hour period "would commence the moment a person is detained by the arresting authority suspecting him to have committed an offence, when his liberty is effectively curtailed."

The Court was categorical that the Constitution permits only one exclusion. It further observed that "Article 22(2) does not sanction exclusion of the time taken for inquiry or investigation before the arresting authority could affect arrest of the detainee. This is beyond the mandate of clause (2) of Article 22. The only exception the Constitution itself provides is the time necessary for the journey from the place of arrest to the court of the magistrate." 

Any "buffer zone" in which liberty is curtailed for investigative purposes without formal arrest is unconstitutional; there can be no suspension or holding in abeyance of fundamental rights. Equally significant is the Court's refusal to accept the High Courts' distinction between investigative "detention" and accusatory "arrest." 

It warned: "An artificial distinction between 'arrest' and 'detention' would be highly problematic. If we venture into such semantics, the question will naturally arise as to who will determine what a short investigative period is or when a detention extends beyond the short investigative period."

There is, the Court said, "no such thing called temporary disruption of liberty"—echoing Justice Krishna Iyer's four-decade-old denunciation in Niranjan Singh v Prabhakar Rajaram Kharote (1980) of "equivocatory quibblings and hide-and-seek niceties" as "unfair evasions of the straightforwardness of the law."

Why the Judgment is Significant 

The judgment's first major contribution is that it closes the "screening of arrest" loophole. The practice of not recording arrest or recording it late, to defeat the 24-hour rule, has long been documented.

In DK Basu v State of West Bengal (1997), the Supreme Court itself noted that "worst violations of human rights take place during the course of investigation when the police with a view to secure evidence or confession often resorts to third degree methods including torture and adopts techniques of screening arrest by either not recording the arrest or describing the deprivation of liberty merely as a prolonged interrogation."

The Bombay High Court in Ashak Hussain Allah Detha had similarly condemned the "reprehensible practice" of manipulating arrest records. Sujit Das converts these observations into an enforceable rule: the clock starts with the curtailment of liberty, and no paperwork can rewind it.

Secondly, the judgment resists the exceptionalism of special statutes. The State's argument was, in essence, that the NDPS Act's elaborate search, seizure, and sampling requirements justify delaying formal arrest.

The Court demolished this view and held that "compliance with the procedural formalities of the NDPS Act and the Rules of 2022 does not in any manner prevent the arresting authority from producing the detainee before the magistrate within the constitutionally prescribed time limit of 24 hours."

It further held that if investigation is incomplete, the remedy is judicial remand under Section 187 BNSS (Section 167 CrPC), not extra-judicial custody. This has obvious implications for the Prevention of Money-Laundering Act (PMLA), Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), and other special regimes where similar arguments are routinely advanced.

Thirdly, the Court fortifies Article 21 against Section 37. In a notable passage, the Court expressed "reservation" about observations in State of Punjab v. Sukhwinder Singh @ Gora, suggesting that Article 21 rights must be exercised within the framework of Section 37 of the NDPS Act, noting that such observations may be per incuriam given the three-judge Bench in KA Najeeb.

Hence, the message is clear that procedural illegality in arrest is an independent, Article 21-based ground for release that statutory bail restrictions cannot override.

Enforcing Structural Change

The Court has imposed new duties on magistrates, converting the remand hearing from a mechanical ritual into a site of genuine judicial oversight.

Magistrates must now record the actual date and time of detention, not merely the recorded arrest; examine whether 24 hours have been complied with from that point; release the person forthwith if there is a breach; and even where 24 hours is met, assess whether the detention exceeded a "reasonable period" under Section 58 BNSS, and decline remand if it did.

This is a structural shift that the magistrate becomes the guarantor of the constitutional clock rather than a passive endorser of police paperwork. By settling the conflict between Biswajit Mandal (Kerala, 2025) on one side and Aryaman Pattnayak (Orissa), Kannan (Madras), and Arun K Thomas (Kerala, 2026) on the other, the Court has also restored uniformity on a question affecting every arrest in the country.

For the individual in custody, the judgment offers several concrete remedies.

1. First, it creates a readily provable breach. If the FIR, seizure memo or case diary shows interception at a time materially earlier than the recorded arrest, and production occurred more than 24 hours after interception, the detention is unconstitutional and release must follow.

2. Second, it obliges the magistrate to inquire into this at the very first production, giving the arrestee an early, judicially monitored remedy rather than forcing him to wait months for bail.

3. Third, it recognises that even detention within 24 hours can be unlawful if unreasonably long, a protective rule for the many detainees held for hours without any judicial oversight.

4. Fourth, it supplies a constitutional, Article 21-based release ground that operates independently of the stringent bail tests in special statutes, a lifeline in NDPS, PMLA, and UAPA cases.

5. Finally, the direction to circulate the judgment to all DGsP and judicial academies signals an intent to change front-line behaviour, not merely decide one case. 

A Hope against Illegal Detention

In all totality, Sujit Das is a landmark judgment in the constitutional law of liberty, as it replaces a formalistic, document-driven conception of arrest with a substantive one anchored in the actual curtailment of freedom, and it restores to Article 22(2) the rigorous, mandatory character the framers intended.

The judgment's ultimate significance, however, will depend on magistrates. If they take seriously their new duty to record the true time of detention and to ask hard questions at the remand stage, the judgment will transform the first 24 hours of custody from a zone of police discretion into one of judicial accountability. Judicial academies, public prosecutors, and legal aid lawyers all have a role in ensuring that the ruling does not remain confined to its reportable text. 

That, as the Court itself reminds us, that it is precisely what the Constitution demands. The right to be produced before a magistrate within 24 hours is not a procedural nicety but a shield against the darkest possibilities of custody.

By making that shield begin where liberty actually ends, Sujit Das ensures that the Constitution's clock cannot be stopped by the stroke of a police pen. It is a judgment that speaks not only to the four appellants in Tripura but to every person who will ever be taken into custody in this country—a reminder that in the architecture of Article 22, liberty is the rule, and detention the carefully bounded exception.

(Areeb Uddin Ahmed is an advocate practising at the Allahabad High Court. He writes on various legal developments. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)