#dnaEdit: Don’t deny bail

The Supreme Court(SC) order granting bail to two of the 147 jailed workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited(MSIL) has taken a long time in coming. On Monday, the SC had granted bail to Sunil Kumar and Kanwaljeet Singh. The jailed men are accused of murder and rioting at MSIL’s factory plant at Manesar on July 18, 2012, in which a plant manager, Awanish Kumar Dev, was killed. The “jail versus bail” debate is far from settled in India, despite renowned judges like VR Krishna Iyer weighing heavily in favour of the latter. Lower courts are more likely to lean towards the prosecution’s stance on bail unless the accused has access to good legal aid. The prosecution typically raises concerns of accused fleeing from justice, intimidating witnesses, or the gravity and magnitude of the offence, to oppose bail. In this case, the full might of the Haryana state was ranged against these young workers, predominantly in their twenties. An RTI reply accessed by NDTV reveals how senior advocate KTS Tulsi billed an astronomical sum of Rs5.5 crore for his services as a special public prosecutor. 

The lower courts must take the cue from Monday’s SC order and grant bail to the other workers on the principle of parity. Courts often respond positively to accused persons who raise the parity principle seeking an equal footing with other co-accused who have secured bail. The workers, in jail since July 2012, had moved the Gurgaon sessions court thrice, the Punjab and Haryana high court twice and the SC once before, for bail, but until this Monday they had found little sympathy from the judges. Now that all the prosecution witnesses have testified, and the untenable ground that these workers, bereft of money or muscle power, would coerce or influence witnesses does not hold anymore, there is no case for their continued judicial custody. It must be recalled that many prominent jurists had echoed the “bail, not jail” dictum to demand the release of corporate honchos and politicians accused in the 2G spectrum scam case. Admittedly, cases of financial misdemeanour cannot be compared with a murder-rioting case. 

But the circumstances leading up to the July 18 incident too must be considered when judging the workers. Complaints about back-breaking working conditions and the demand for a registered trade union went completely unheeded by the management and the state despite three rounds of strikes in 2011. The July 2012 incident was also preceded by a month-long standoff between the unrecognised Maruti Suzuki Workers Union(MSWU) and the management. In 2014, the management finally saw wisdom in conducting union elections, which the MSWU won against all odds. Even the trial has witnessed its share of oddities. The Hindu had reported the curious case of four labour contractors deposing against 89 workers; one contractor was to depose against 25 workers whose names fell in the alphabetical range of A-G, the next against workers in the G-P range, a third was to testify against 26 workers in the P-S name-range, and a fourth against 13 workers in the S-Y range. Clearly, there is something fishy in the prosecution’s case. In July 2013, a high court judge dismissed the workers’ bail plea noting that their actions had lowered India’s reputation and scared away foreign investors from investing “money in India out of fear of labour unrest”. This reasoning signifies that even extraneous politico-economic reasons can take precedence over the right to personal liberty. Last December, however, another HC judge admitted that the workers were entitled to bail but asked them to approach the Supreme Court. Now that the SC has spoken, the subordinate courts must reconsider the workers’ claims for bail on humanitarian grounds. They are not cold-blooded murderers.