Last Friday, a Bench of the Supreme Court of India led by the Chief Justice of India, Justice U.U. Lalit, granted interim bail to human rights activist Teesta Setalvad who was arrested in June this year. She has now walked out of jail. The order is, without doubt, a great relief to Ms. Setalvad personally, and to the country’s liberty jurisprudence at large. The Court, in the instant case, has directly confronted a politically vindicative executive and performed its role. Yet, the order calls for critical discourse.
Needed, answers
Rather than the solution of interim bail that the Court has rightly provided to the activist, it is the set of questions that it has posed which requires the attention of all concerned, especially those at the helm of affairs. During the hearing, the judges underlined four “features” of the case that “bothered” the Court. They are: omission in filing the charge sheet even after two months of Ms. Setalvad’s arrest; registration of the First Information Report (FIR) on the very next day of the Supreme Court’s judgment that dismissed Zakia Jafri’s plea against exoneration of Narendra Modi and others in the 2002 Gujarat riots, with strictures against Ms. Setalvad and others; the long adjournment of the bail plea by the High Court (from August 3 to a date after September 19); lack of allegations regarding commission of any offence serious enough to deny bail.
