A Supreme Court’s direction that activists Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira should “pair” their mobile phones with that of the National Investigation Agency (NIA) probe officer as a condition for grant of their bail in the Bhima Koregaon case has come barely a week after another Bench of the court flagged whether a bail condition imposed by the Delhi High Court on an accused to share the Google PIN of his location with the investigating officer offended his fundamental right to personal liberty, life and privacy.
A Bench headed by Justice Aniruddha Bose on July 28 ordered Mr. Gonsalves and Mr. Ferreira to keep the location status of their mobile phones active 24 hours a day. “Their phones shall be paired with that of the Investigating Officer of the NIA to enable him, at any given time, to identify the appellants’ exact location,” the court directed.
The top court said the prosecution could “seek cancellation of the bail of each or any of the defaulting appellants without any further reference to this court” in case any of the bail conditions are breached.
The judgment follows a July 21 order of another top court Bench led by Justice A.S. Oka, which was examining the bail conditions imposed by the Delhi High Court on Raman Bhurarua, an accused in a money-laundering case related to the Shakti Bhoj Foods bank fraud. The High Court had required the accused to “drop a PIN on the Google map to ensure that their location is available to the investigating officer”.
“The question is whether this condition will offend the rights of the accused under Article 21 [fundamental right to life] of the Constitution,” Justice Oka’s Bench recorded in a three-page order. The Bench has scheduled the case for hearing on August 14.
“Location sharing is an undoubtedly intrusive practice which forces accused persons to barter their right to privacy for their liberty. No degree of fear in the minds of agencies can sanction a practice where a person remains under a panopticon of surveillance even when outside of prison. Courts can, and should, consider less intrusive means to secure state interests,” advocate Abhinav Sekhri reacted to the bail condition in the July 28 judgment.
In 2021, the Supreme Court had lashed out against the imposition of “onerous” conditions for grant of bail, saying that such terms “tantamount to denial of bail”.
Drawing attention to the ambiguity of what the court meant by “pairing” in the July 28 order, Srinivas Kodali, a data and information security researcher, said the NIA may be installing a location tracking app in the two phones.
Data protection activist Anjali Bhardwaj said mobile phones today were an “extension of the self”, storing facts and facets of our personal lives.
