Delhi Court Sentences Sukesh Chandrasekhar to Eight Years for Posing as Supreme Court Judge; High Court Challenge Follows

A Delhi court has sentenced Sukesh Chandrasekhar to eight years of rigorous imprisonment for impersonating a sitting Supreme Court judge and trying to force a special judge to grant him bail in a 2017 corruption case. The Tis Hazari court called the act a direct attack on the independence of the judiciary. Chandrasekhar has already moved the Delhi High Court, asking it to set aside the conviction and remove remarks that describe him as a “conman,” “seasoned conman” and “fraudster.”

Chief Judicial Magistrate Harshita Mishra convicted him on 20 August 2026 under Indian Penal Code Sections 170, 189 and 507. The sentencing order, dated 29 August and made public on 31 August, directed the three terms to run one after another rather than together. He received two years and a fine of Rs 5,000 for impersonating a public servant, two years and another Rs 5,000 fine for threatening a public servant, and four years for criminal intimidation through anonymous communication. Default on the fines would add a further month in jail. Time already spent in custody is to be set off against the sentence.

The court said the punishment had to send a deterrent message. In its view, this was not ordinary cheating. It was an attempt to borrow the authority of the country’s highest court and use it to extract a judicial order.

The 2017 Calls

The case began on 28 April 2017. Chandrasekhar was then in Delhi Police Crime Branch custody in a separate corruption matter pending before Special Judge Poonam Chaudhary. Prosecution said he got hold of the smartphone of his custody officer, Constable Manjeet, and used it to call the judge’s chamber landline and mobile.

The first voice identified itself as the personal secretary of a sitting Supreme Court judge from South India, referred to in later reporting as Justice “KJ” from Kerala. A second voice then came on the line, using a regional accent and claiming to be the judge himself. The caller said he was speaking on behalf of the Union Home Ministry and the Supreme Court Collegium. He told the special judge he had seen the FIR, found no substance in the charges, and directed her to release “accused Sukesh” on interim bail at once. When she hesitated, the caller warned of serious professional consequences.

Judge Chaudhary did not comply. She checked with the Supreme Court and spoke to the actual private secretary of the judge whose identity had been used. She was told no such call had been made and that no personal secretary named “Hanumant Prasad” existed in that office. She lodged a complaint the next day. FIR No. 100/2017 was registered at Subzi Mandi police station. The Crime Branch later took over the investigation and filed a charge sheet in April 2018. Trial began in February 2019.

Nine years later, the magistrate held that the prosecution had proved the case beyond reasonable doubt. Chandrasekhar, the court said, had first impersonated the secretary and then the judge, and had done so in order to interfere with a pending proceeding about his own liberty.

Why the Court Treated It as Institutional, Not Routine Fraud

The 121-page conviction order is unusually blunt. Mishra wrote that there are cases that test the law, cases that test the evidence, and cases that test “the limits of human audacity and mendacity.” She described the impersonation as “institutional sacrilege” and a “direct affront” to the sanctity of the judicial process.

One passage has been widely quoted: “He operated under the dangerous belief that if a lie is only grand enough and uttered with sufficient audacity, the rule of law will simply bow its head and step aside. He forgot that impersonating a bureaucrat or a political broker is a transactional crime born of greed, but impersonating a Supreme Court judge or his secretary is an act of institutional defiance.”

Another: “He assumed the judiciary would respond with the same quiet compliance as his other corporate targets. What Sukesh failed to calculate in his risk assessment is that the judiciary does not negotiate its authority with shadow callers. In attempting to flex non-existent judicial muscles from behind a phone screen, he overplayed his hand so completely that he collapsed his own house of cards.”

The court also said a courtroom may be entered through its doors, but justice cannot be entered “through the back door of impersonation, intimidation or manufactured authority.” If such a ruse had worked, it warned, every pending case could become vulnerable to an invisible parallel system operating by telephone rather than by evidence.

On sentencing, Mishra held that the three offences were distinct and should not merge. She found no genuine remorse and no significant mitigating circumstances. The choice of identity, she said, was not accidental. Chandrasekhar had selected a constitutional office precisely because of the authority attached to it.

Gaps in the Police Investigation

Even while convicting him, the court criticised the Delhi Police probe as “superficial, shoddy and marked by apathy.” Investigating officers, it said, recorded a few statements months late, collected readily available documents and followed the immediate telephone trail, but did not record the complainant’s statement under Section 161 of the CrPC and did not examine staff present with the judicial officer on the day of the calls.

The magistrate asked how Chandrasekhar obtained physical access to a police constable’s phone while in custody. That question, she said, could not be left unanswered. She directed the Commissioner of Police to re-examine Constable Manjeet’s role and to consider training, protocols and advisories on preserving electronic evidence, tracing devices, examining witnesses promptly and securing CCTV and custody records.

The High Court Petition

Immediately after the 20 August conviction, Chandrasekhar approached the Delhi High Court through advocate Anant Malik. The petition seeks to set aside the judgment in the Subzi Mandi FIR and to expunge remarks described as derogatory, pejorative, stigmatic and unnecessary. The defence argues that the trial court decided the case on an assumed character rather than on evidence, displayed a predetermined mindset, and did not allow the defence evidence to be completed.

Malik has also pointed to the absence of the phone itself and of call recordings, and to the fact that his client has already spent years in custody for offences whose individual maximum sentences are far shorter. The petition notes earlier judicial caution against labelling him a “conman” in pending matters.

On 31 August, Delhi Police objected to the maintainability of the writ petition. Police counsel said Chandrasekhar should file a regular appeal against conviction and sentence and raise all issues there, rather than attack selected remarks through a separate petition after the sentencing order had already been passed. Justice Madhu Jain listed arguments on maintainability for 3 November 2026.

What Comes Next

The trial court has closed one chapter of a case that began with a phone call from custody in 2017. The High Court will now decide whether the conviction stands, whether the language used in the judgment should be struck out, and whether the proper route is a writ or a regular criminal appeal.

For the judiciary, the order is meant as a warning that impersonating a judge is not a clever shortcut but an attack on the process itself. For Chandrasekhar, the fight has shifted from Tis Hazari to the High Court, where both the eight-year term and the words used to describe him are now under challenge.

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