The Supreme Court has been reaching out to the government to “think out of the box” and not fight every case of bail all the way up to the top court.
Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul, the second senior most judge in the top court, has been vocal about his concern of how almost every case of bail is being challenged all the way to the Supreme Court, forming more than one-third of the cases in the Supreme Court.
Recently, Justice Kaul, speaking at a conference in Varanasi, said the inflow of bail and remission cases to the Supreme Court was so high that “some kind of revolution” or “out-of-the-box thinking” would be required on the part of the government to change things. If not, these cases, in the normal course, may only be disposed of by courts — already struggling with a heavy backlog — in another 300 to 700 years.
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“We have a huge undertrial population... Is it that we are thinking that we cannot convict them, so let’s punish them by keeping them in prison during that period of time? This seems unfortunately a philosophy which permeates. Somewhere this philosophy must be jettisoned... Leave aside murder or extremely heinous cases, I have not understood the purpose of custodial interrogation beyond the period of chargesheet being filed,” Justice Kaul said.
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On January 17, a Bench led by Justice Kaul had remarked that the court did not “believe in unnecessarily keeping people behind the bars” while hearing a challenge by the Delhi Police against the bail granted to activists Devangana Kalita, Natasha Narwal and Asif Iqbal Tanha in a case connected to the 2020 Delhi riots.
Pending cases
In December last year, Justice Kaul had pointed out how bail applications were being argued at length in the Supreme Court as if they were appeals against conviction.
Justice Kaul’s comments come a couple of months after the Supreme Court decided to give priority to pending bail petitions by having every Bench of the court hear 10 bail cases every day before normal work.
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In July last year, a Supreme Court judgment had urged the government to bring a new Act exclusively to simplify and streamline bails. The court had observed how the mindset of investigating agencies leaned more towards the draconian power of arrest rather than the protection of individual liberty.
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“Jails in India are flooded with undertrial prisoners. The statistics placed before us would indicate that more than two-thirds of the inmates of the prisons constitute undertrial prisoners. Of this category of prisoners, majority may not even be required to be arrested,” Justice Sundresh, who authored the judgment, had observed.
“In a democracy, there can never be an impression that it is a Police State,” the judgment said.
