LUCKNOW, Feb. 10 -- The Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court has strongly disapproved of a counsel's attempt to rely on a verse from the Ramcharitmanas to justify a nearly three-year delay in filing a writ petition, observing that literary and religious texts cannot be cited in court without understanding their context or relevance to the case. Finding no procedural infirmity in the Information Commission's decision rejecting the recall application, the court held that there was no illegality in the order dated February 17, 2023. Accordingly, the high court dismissed the writ petition at the admission stage. While hearing a challenge to an order of the Uttar Pradesh State Information Commission (SIC), Justice Subhash Vidyarthi recently questioned the petitioner's counsel on his reliance on the verse 'Samrath Kahun Nahi Dosh Gosain, Ravi Pavak Sursari Ki Nain' to argue that strict principles should not bind the court's discretion. When asked to explain who said the verse, to whom, and in what context, the counsel admitted that he was unaware of it. The court then explained that the verse was spoken by Narad Muni to Himalaya in the Ramcharitmanas in the context of describing Lord Shiva's attributes and could not be invoked to excuse unexplained delay in legal proceedings. Emphasising that writ jurisdiction is discretionary and guided by settled principles, the court cautioned that extracting passages from religious texts without understanding their meaning is no different from selectively quoting statutes or judgments divorced from context. A writ petition was filed by Avanindra Kumar Gupta challenging an order of February 17, 2023, passed by the SIC, which had rejected his application seeking recall of an earlier order of August 24, 2021. By the 2021 order, the commission had dismissed Gupta's RTI appeal after recording his statement that the information sought by him had already been provided. The court noted that the writ petition had been instituted in December 2025, nearly two years and ten months after the impugned order, and that there was "absolutely no averment" in the petition explaining the delay. When questioned on why such a belated petition should be entertained, the petitioner's counsel Shyam Sundar Dubey argued that the Limitation Act does not apply to proceedings under Article 226 of the Constitution. In support of this submission, the counsel relied on a quotation attributed to George Bernard Shaw and cited the verse from the Ramcharitmanas, apparently to suggest that rigid rules should not constrain judicial discretion. The court, however, reiterated that while the Limitation Act may not strictly apply to writ proceedings, the jurisdiction under Article 226 is extraordinary and discretionary, and is governed by well-settled principles. One such principle, the court said, is that a litigant must approach the court with reasonable promptitude and cannot seek indulgence in the absence of any explanation for delay. In the present case, the court noted, the petitioner had failed to disclose any reason whatsoever for the delay of nearly three years in approaching the high court. In Gupta's case, the court noted that his RTI appeal had been dismissed on August 24, 2021, after his own statement was recorded that the information sought had been supplied. His subsequent plea that the information was incomplete, despite having made such a statement before the commission, did not fall within any of the grounds prescribed under Rule 12 of the Uttar Pradesh Right to Information Rules, 2015, which governs recall of orders passed by the Information Commission....