The Supreme Court declared on August 13, not for the first time, that bail should be the rule and jail the exception. But the striking feature of the judgment was that the petitioner, from Bihar, had been incarcerated under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act. The two-judge bench included the UAPA under the stated norm and granted the petitioner bail. He had rented out his premises allegedly to the outlawed People’s Front of India which allegedly planned to disrupt the prime minister’s visit to the state in July 2022. Earlier, on August 9, the Supreme Court had deplored the fact that trial courts and high courts played safe by denying bail. This was clear in the August 13 case: the petitioner had been denied bail by the trial court and the Patna High Court. The Chief Justice of India had said last March that bail was losing ground in district courts and bail petitions were increasingly landing up in the Supreme Court. In the latest case, the judges made clear that once a case had been made for bail, courts should grant it, since denying bail in deserving cases was a violation of the right to life and liberty enshrined in Article 21 of the Constitution.

With reference to the UAPA case, the Supreme Court said that when there were stringent provisions in the relevant statute, the petitioner should be granted bail if those conditions were satisfied. This ruling has tremendous importance for UAPA prisoners incarcerated without trial for months or years. Arresting dissenters under the UAPA is now a political tendency; many of them have been repeatedly denied bail. The Supreme Court, however, granted bail to some of those incarcerated in the Bhima Koregaon case, including the former professor, Shoma Sen. The court said, in effect, that the accusations against her were groundless. In granting bail to the petitioner from Bihar, the Supreme Court stated that the National Investigation Agency had distorted certain facts in the charge sheet. The court emphasised that the investigation must be fair. This is only too pertinent: investigations have been found to have grave lacunae, particularly in UAPA cases where the intention seems to be to keep the accused imprisoned indefinitely since bail is difficult. The Supreme Court’s latest ruling should put an end to this practice.