For the second time in the same case, the Supreme Court has intervened to grant a welcome respite to activist Teesta Setalvad, who is being prosecuted on charges relating to her role in helping victims of the Gujarat riots pursue justice. The Court has extended till July 19 its interim stay on a Gujarat High Court decision denying her regular bail and directing her to surrender immediately. At first blush, it may appear that the Court was unusually accommodative when it formed a Bench to hear her plea against the High Court order on the same day, and a larger Bench after the one with two judges differed on granting her interim protection from arrest. However, the circumstances are equally unusual and indicate an attempt to keep her in prison for as long as possible. The present case arose from observations by a Bench of the Court virtually canvassing for her arrest and prosecution for “keeping the pot boiling” — a reference to Ms. Setalvad helping victims such as Zakia Jafri to seek justice for killings during the 2002 pogrom. The police lost no time in registering an FIR against her and former IPS officers R.B. Sreekumar and Sanjiv Bhatt, accusing them of fabricating evidence and tutoring witnesses to make statements that showed an alleged plot to implicate key functionaries of the Gujarat government, including the then Chief Minister Narendra Modi.
In September last year, the Court had given her interim bail, following an unusual postponement of her bail hearing in the High Court from August 3 to September 19, 2022. She had by then spent over two months in prison, and was questioned in custody. With the charge sheet having been filed, and the accused having spent considerable time in custody, it was a good case for grant of bail on merits. The Court had asked the High Court to decide on her regular bail application independently. The High Court cited the “gravity of the offence” and the material against her to deny her bail and reject a request to suspend the order for some time. It went so far as to observe that giving her bail would widen communal polarisation. One of the Supreme Court judges found it strange that someone who has been out of prison for nine months was denied even a few days’ time to surrender. As the Supreme Court has said in the past, protection of personal liberty should be ensured at least for a limited duration so that citizens may pursue their legal remedies. The prosecution’s zeal should not alone determine who is free and who is in jail.
