#dnaEdit: Bahubali returns

The bail granted to Siwan strongman Mohammed Shahabuddin by the Patna high court in a case involving the killing of an eye-witness to two other murders beats all reasoning. Here was a man with multiple convictions against his name, including two life sentences, and several other cases in which trial was pending. The two life sentences, one awarded in 2007, and the other in 2015, are apparently in various stages of appeal but it is surprising that the courts are not analysing his conduct and the magnitude of his offences before deciding to grant him bail. In March this year, the Patna high court granted him bail in the life sentence awarded to him in December 2015 for the murders of brothers Satish and Girish Raj who were doused in acid in 2004. In 2014, their elder brother Rajiv Roushan, who was a witness to the twin murders, was killed. Stranger still is the lackadaisical approach of the state government, which was directed by the high court to expedite the trial in the Rajiv Roushan murder case. The trial court failed to make any progress in the case, which became the reason for the high court to enlarge Shahabuddin on bail. 

The RJD leader was also awarded a life sentence in 2007, for the 1999 murder of a CPI-ML worker, and he is yet to be acquitted in this case, nor has his sentence been commuted by the state government. Since 2014, Shahabuddin has been linked to three murders in Siwan, including the recent murder of a Hindi journalist. Though Shahabuddin has spent nearly 11 years in jail, this long period of incarceration cannot solely be a mitigative reason for granting this bail. There is no evidence, based on his criminal record, that the convict has undergone a reformation, but the judiciary and the executive appear very keen to give him a long rope. High courts and the Supreme Court must re-examine the practise of granting bail to a person convicted by the trial court in offences that carry more than four years imprisonment. Granting bail after conviction makes a mockery of the trial process where the trial courts have sifted through the evidence and arrived at a reasoned decision to convict an accused person. If the high court finds flaws in the trial court judgment, it must expedite the appeals process rather than first grant bail and then examine the matter at leisure. After granting bail, cases often languish forever in the appeals stage.

Take the case of Shahabuddin’s boss, Lalu Prasad Yadav, who was convicted by a trial court in October 2013 for five years imprisonment in the fodder scam, but was granted bail by the Supreme Court in December 2013. It can be argued that the urgency to fight the case and get oneself cleared of the taint of conviction diminishes after the convict comes out on bail and regains liberty. The Bihar government has failed to give a convincing answer to the BJP charge that the prosecution soft-pedalled the cases against Shahabuddin allowing his lawyers a plausible defence to plead for bail. Whatever be the reasons, the entire episode paints the criminal justice delivery system in a bad light and crushes the hopes that victims harbour of securing justice. The allure of criminal-politicians like Shahabuddin and Raja Bhaiyya stems from their ability to use violence to coerce opponents and subvert grassroots democracy. By bowing down and even facilitating the reign of terror that such local strongmen, who also double up as local Robinhoods and run parallel and even populist administrations, Nitish Kumar and Lalu Yadav have only themselves to blame for the “jangal raj” claims that refuse to go away.