New Delhi, Dec. 10 -- The Supreme Court on Monday ordered a voice sample test on an Uttar Pradesh deputy inspector general (DIG) to determine if he used derogatory language against Muslims. Simultaneously, the court quashed the prosecution of a Muslim man, who was implicated in a criminal case after attempting to file a complaint against the senior officer. A bench of justices Ahsanuddin Amanullah and K Vinod Chandran termed the initiation of criminal proceedings against Islamuddin Ansari a patent "abuse of authority" and quashed the case in its entirety, while criticising the police for misusing the criminal process to target a citizen who had merely sought to question an officer about the authenticity of an audio clip. Taking strong exception to the circumstances in which Ansari was implicated in a criminal case after he confronted the then superintendent of Police (now DIG), Sanjeev Tyagi, with the audio clip and sought confirmation if it contained his voice and whether the derogatory remarks were indeed spoken by him. Instead of responding to the query, the police initiated proceedings against Ansari during the Covid-19 pandemic and accused him of promoting hatred and circulating obscene material. "Having regard to the aforesaid, we find it to be totally an abuse of their authority and also the process of the court by the police in initiating the proceedings," said the bench, setting aside the case registered in Bijnor in 2020. The FIR had alleged that Ansari circulated the clip containing derogatory comments against the Muslim community, purportedly attributed to Tyagi, and thereby incited anger and public alarm. Ansari, however, maintained that he had not circulated the clip and had only approached the officer privately to confirm its authenticity. Calling the prosecution "wholly unjustified", the Supreme Court observed that the real issue lay in how a citizen raising a legitimate query about a senior police officer's conduct was instead turned into an accused. The bench ordered that the voice sample of Tyagi be taken and forensically compared with the audio clip that Ansari had confronted him with. The court directed that the sample be sent for examination at the Telangana State Forensic Sciences Laboratory in Hyderabad. The report is to be submitted in a sealed cover by January 31 next year....