Manipur violence: Supreme Court orders forensic examination of entire 48-minute audio clip
Top court had on December 15, 2025, wondered why the entire available leaked audio clips were not sent for forensic examination
The Supreme Court on Wednesday ordered forensic examination of the entire 48-minute audio recording allegedly alluded to the role of former Manipur chief minister N Biren Singh in the 2023 ethnic violence.
“The entire 48 minutes of the conversation in question along with the admitted voice recordings of the former Manipur CM are available... All the voice recordings furnished to the respondents by the learned counsel for the petitioner shall also be included therewith and forwarded to the National Forensic Science University (NFSU), Gandhinagar,” A Bench of Justice Sanjay Kumar and Justice K Vinod Chandran ordered.
The top court had on December 15, 2025, wondered why the entire available leaked audio clips were not sent for forensic examination. The Bench had said it was a “little disturbed” by the November 20 affidavit of the petitioners that said only select clippings were sent to Gujarat’s NFSU Laboratory.
It had sought to know why the entire available leaked audio clip of around 48 minutes was not sent to NFSU for examination.
Audio clips allegedly implicating the former Manipur Chief Minister in the 2023 ethnic violence were tampered with and not scientifically fit for voice comparison, NFSL Gandhinagar, had on November 3 told the Supreme Court.
In its report submitted to the top court, the NFSL had virtually given a clean chit to him, saying no opinion on similarity or dissimilarity of the speakers could be offered.
Singh resigned as the chief minister of Manipur on February 9, amid rumblings within the state BJP and growing demands for a change in leadership.
On behalf of KOHU, advocate Prashant Bhushan submitted that the matter had come up before the Court around ten times and that government counsel had been present on every occasion. He says the petition itself included a transcript of the entire 48-minute conversation and that the audio recording had also been provided.
Bhushan argued that the authorities are fully aware of the existence of the complete recording and could have sought it from KOHUR if they believed it had not been formally served. When the Bench asked why the audio was not directly provided to the respondents, the senior counsel said there had been no formal notice requiring them to do so.
Additional solicitor general (ASG) Aishwarya Bhati, representing the Union Government and the State, told the court that the full 48-minute recording had been received only after the last hearing in December. She said the clip had not been shared earlier despite repeated efforts to obtain it.
