SC ruling on interim bail a big step

The Supreme Court judgment regarding the granting of bail is a big win for liberty and constitutional rights. It brings to an end an injustice that has unnecessarily prevailed for long. The apex court has said that courts have an inherent power to grant interim bail to a person pending disposal of the bail application. This means that the practice of courts sending a person who has applied for regular bail to jail, and then looking into the case diary which has to be obtained from the police, has now ended. The Supreme Court has clarified that courts can continue to decide regular bail pleas after perusing the case diaries and other evidence, but it is within their jurisdiction and discretionary powers to grant interim bail to the accused to protect their reputation from being dented by their arrest by the police. It is true that going to jail dents a person’s reputation and image in society. It can cause irreparable harm and loss to a person even when arrested for a minor offence. The Supreme Court has, thus, rightly taken serious note of this and has said that even if the arrested accused applied for bail and was released thereafter, his reputation might still be tarnished irreparably. The apex court has gone on to interpret the power of courts to grant interim bail in the light of Article 21 of the Constitution which protects the life and liberty of every person. It has said in its judgment that the reputation of a person is a valuable asset for him and constitutes a part of his constitutional rights.

Under the law an individual is presumed to be innocent unless proven guilty. Given the low conviction rates in our courts, the majority of those brought before them are innocent. This means that a very large percentage of individuals who were sent to jail and have been denied bail till now are wrongly being detained. Such individuals have had to suffer needlessly in police or judicial custody. Sometimes such imprisonment has extended for weeks depending on the gravity of the alleged offence and resulted in brutal treatment of those detained. In the past the law has also been subject to misuse. False cases have been lodged against individuals merely to harass them. Regrettably, some of these have tended to be politically motivated or at the behest of vested interests. It hardly needs to be said that this power to grant bail, though discretionary, is not arbitrary. Bail should only be denied when absolutely necessary to curtail the freedom of an individual, and bail, not custody, should be the rule. Therefore, the Supreme Court judgment ends the misuse of law and upholds civil liberty.