Sisodia case: Rap on knuckles for ED, CBI

The Supreme Court granting bail to Manish Sisodia, former deputy chief minister of Delhi, amounts to an indictment of both the Enforcement  Directorate (ED) and the CBI, which arrested him in connection with the Delhi liquor scam and had him incarcerated for 17 months. The court also made stinging comments about how Sisodia was robbed of his right to speedy trial, a ‘’sacrosanct right.’’ It said Sisodia could not be made to run from pillar to post for bail, starting from the trial court and going all the way up to the Supreme Court, with the plea becoming a snake and ladder game. The court also noted that bail should not be withheld as punishment.

The investigators had told the court last year that the trial would be completed in six months, but it has not started even now. As the court remarked, there was not the remotest possibility of the trial concluding in the near future as the prosecution had lined up 493 witnesses and listed over a lakh pages and 1,000 documents in the case. It also rejected the agencies’ false claim that the delay was caused by Sisodia. The court’s grounds for bail is relevant even in cases related to Elgar Parishad and the Delhi riots. Some of the questions raised by it are also relevant in deciding bail pleas and assessing the investigating agencies’ actions. By asserting that the right to speedy trial cannot be denied on the basis of severity of the crime, the court may have made it clear that the right to liberty cannot be violated even under laws like the PMLA and the UAPA, which have extremely restrictive bail provisions. The court also noted that Sisodia did not pose a flight risk and there was no possibility of his tampering with the evidence. It should also be noted that the court rejected the plea for barring him from visiting his office and the Delhi secretariat. 

The judgement should guide the lower courts, which the top court has said seemed to be playing safe in matters of granting bail. The court believes the reluctance had resulted in the Supreme Court being flooded with ’’open-and-shut’’ bail cases. Ideas such as ‘’bail is the rule and jail is the exception’’ and ‘’process should not become the punishment’’ are not new, but they need to be reiterated and enforced by the court when they are being increasingly violated. The court’s order and observations will likely have implications for other cases too, including the one related to Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, still in jail facing CBI’s charges, though he was granted bail in an ED case.