00:00article 21 which guarantees the right to protection of life and liberty of all persons
00:09and article 32 which allows citizens to approach the court if their fundamental rights are being
00:15violated the question then arises this is there in the letter of the constitution but is the
00:22spirit being embraced because i specifically refer to laws that have been brought in by government
00:28by parliament uapa pmla that make it very very difficult for a citizen uh to be able to enforce
00:38his rights enshrined under article 21 of the constitution right to life and liberty the
00:43the very nature of the law means that most courts deny bail at the very first instance and you spend
00:49years in jail if you're arrested under uapa or pmla so the difference between the letter of the law
00:55and the spirit of it and therefore the heart and soul of the constitution is somewhere being eroded
01:01you know one of the fundamental aspects of our law has been the presumption of innocence
01:06that unless a person is proven to be guilty that person is presumed to be innocent which means
01:14as justice krishnaya said bail must be the rule jail must be the exception now our laws including you
01:22some of the recent laws uh have imposed very stringent uh you know requirements before bail can be granted
01:29what can the judges do in a situation like that the task of a judge is not an easy task but one thing
01:36which judges can do and which the supreme court has done it began with a judgment by justice surya kant
01:43uh a year or two years two years ago uh which is really a very significant judgment
01:48is this that if the trial is unlikely to conclude at a reasonably foreseeable future
01:56uh then the right to a fair trial which means an expeditious trial cannot be denied in other words
02:05if the trial is not going to conclude earlier then irrespective of the stringent requirements of that
02:11particular law bail must be granted to that individual suppose there are hundred witnesses which are cited
02:18by an investigative agency now those hundred witnesses are not going to be examined until
02:22say five years or six years or seven years uh end what if that person is eventually acquitted that
02:28means that person would have spent five years in jail though that person was eventually held to be
02:33innocent so one way of enforcing the right to life under article 21 which you've rightly highlighted
02:40is to ensure that this is born in mind by the courts namely yeah go ahead namely namely that unless the
02:49investigative agency can be put to a temporal limit that you're going to conclude the trial uh within
02:56say a year or you're going to conclude the trial within a foreseeable period bail should be granted
03:03you know i i don't know whether you know where i'm taking you to but one of the contentious issues
03:09based on exactly what you said just now is the umar khalid case which has attracted so much of media
03:15attention he spent five years in jail he and other activists arrested under uapa for their alleged role
03:21in a conspiracy of the delhi riots of 2020 trial hasn't begun the court says there are hundreds of
03:27witnesses who still have to be produced before the court he's continuing incarceration isn't it against
03:33the spirit of article 21 uh rajdeep i've made my point clear on the issue of principle yes and i believe
03:41that the principle which i have spoken about now as a citizen not as a judge must be applied across the
03:48board on this particular case the supreme court has seized off the issue next week and merely because
03:54i have ceased to be a judge i shouldn't become a citizen journalist and tell the supreme court what
03:59they should be doing next week but you're stating a principle you're emphasizing the principle that if
04:06the investigating authorities cannot conclude a trial within and a within a certain finite period
04:15then bail must be the rule and jail the exception are we clear on that absolutely and subject to
04:21exceptions which i said uh which are well settled these are not exceptions which i have devised right
04:26now in the course of the interview these are exceptions which have been developed over the last 75
04:30years in in the course of our jurisprudence because there is an element of selectivity
04:36also in this entire practice of bail not jail let me give you an example when you were a judge you gave
04:42for example a former colleague of mine ordnob goswamy you you you were heading a vacation bench at the time
04:48you speedily granted him bail rightly so we believe because he was the manner in which he had been
04:54confined i believe was he had been wrongfully confined and therefore you gave him bail speedily
04:58then you have a siddik kapan another journalist lesser known spends more than two years in jail and
05:04is not granted bail and i can give you a number of cases where individuals who perhaps do not have the same
05:09access or or are not vvips do not get get bail instantly so the entire law of bail seems to be
05:18dependent on selectivity and who the judge is i hear from senior lawyers if i go before a particular
05:24judge i know i won't get bail and there's been this talk that that's one of the reasons why uh
05:29adjournments are sought or you withdraw a particular case from a particular judge does that again trouble
05:34you the admin we are coming to the administration of justice whether bail is also very selective
05:39you know rajdeep let me make it very clear so far as i'm concerned and i've said this before
05:44i granted bail to uh mr arnab goswamy yes but i also granted bail to zubair yes so therefore i said well
05:52i have granted bail from a to z and that was my own personal philosophy that you must grant bail particularly
06:00in a certain category of offenses now i'll you've highlighted but you was missing umar khalid you
06:05he didn't appear before you but he may have but gone before another judge i'll deal with that i'm
06:09exactly what you're the point which you're making i don't want to duck that issue yes i want to respond
06:14to that one of the issues which a lot of people have spoken about say our courts today is that we are
06:23polycentric courts or poly vocal courts not really polycentric that's uh lon lon fuller's phrase we are
06:31poly vocal courts now what is meant by a poly vocal court with the kind of volume of litigation which we
06:39have say 80 000 cases uh 70 000 cases being filed every year in the supreme court no supreme court in
06:46the world perhaps except for the brazilian supreme court deals with deals with this kind of inflow of
06:52cases now as a result what happens is this you have 34 judges in the supreme court obviously all 34 can't
07:00sit down together and you know deal with one case because then you wouldn't be dealing with cases
07:05uh so we sit in batches of two we sit occasionally in batches of three but usually in batches of two
07:12judges so you have 17 benches now with 17 benches deciding cases you're bound to have a poly vocal court
07:20where you know personal predispositions of judges in a very abstract sense rajdeep it shouldn't make a
07:27difference as to which bench you go before but you have to accept that well uh different judges have
07:35different predispositions the way they think about our social life the way they think about the law uh you
07:42know when i was a lawyer you would have judges who would be a little more uh you know favorable to labor
07:48other judges felt that you know our law had gone to the extreme in protecting the rights of labor and
07:53not protecting the rights of industry uh so you know you have different philosophies among judges
07:59should these be there should they not be there the fact of the matter is you cannot avoid it
08:07and just a reminder that you can catch that entire interview uh with justice chandral
08:11where he speaks on a variety of subjects including the cash for door case that has caused such a stir
08:18as well as sedition free speech and plenty more collegium system on our india today
08:23youtube channel so look out for that on the india today youtube channel
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