Wednesday is the scheduled date for the Supreme Court to hear Teesta Setalvad’s appeal of the Gujarat High Court’s decision to deny her request for regular bail and order her to surrender right away in a case involving the alleged fabrication of evidence to frame innocent people in 2002 post-Godhra riot cases. Teesta Setalvad is a social activist.
Setalvad was shielded from arrest and the high court’s ruling was postponed for a week by the highest court in a rare late-night session on July 1.
The petition will be heard by a bench made up of justices B R Gavai, A S Bopanna, and Dipankar Datta, according to the subject list for Wednesday posted on the highest court website.
The three-judge bench had questioned the denial of time to Setalvad to appeal against the high court’s July 1 ruling during the late-night session on Saturday, stating even a regular criminal is entitled to some kind of interim relief.
“Under normal conditions, we wouldn’t have given such a request any thought. However, it should be mentioned that the petitioner was detained after a FIR was filed against him on June 25, 2022.
According to an order dated September 2, 2022, “This court examining the motion for grant of temporary bail had granted the same under certain conditions. The petitioner’s status as a woman who qualified for special protection under Section 437 of the Criminal Procedure Code was one of the considerations for this court, the bench stated in its ruling.
“We believe that, in light of this reality, the single judge should have provided at least some protection to provide the petitioner enough time to dispute the single judge’s ruling in front of this court.
“In that view of the matter, without considering anything regarding the merits of the matter, finding that the single judge was not correct in granting even some protection, we grant a stay of the impugned order passed by the high court for a period of one week from today,” it had said.
The registrar must get permission from the Chief Justice of India, according to the supreme court, in order to schedule Setalvad’s bail hearing before the proper bench.
Setalvad’s senior attorney C. U. Singh said at the hearing on July 1 that the high court had given the activist temporary protection on September 2, 2022, pending the outcome of her bail plea.
Nobody has shown that she has broken a requirement of the temporary release given to her, according to Singh.
In his appearance on behalf of the Gujarat government, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta pleaded with the top court to treat Setalvad equally with other citizens.
After a two-judge vacation bench couldn’t agree on whether to provide temporary protection from arrest to Setalvad on the same day, the three-judge bench heard the case in a special sitting on July 1.
Setalvad, who was about to be arrested, immediately petitioned the supreme court for protection from arrest, but the two-judge vacation bench was unable to agree to give her temporary respite.
Justices Abhay S. Oka and Prashant Kumar Mishra, who were on vacation, had directed the case to Chief Justice D.Y. Chandrachud, who quickly assembled a bench of three judges to hear Setalvad’s appeal against the high court’s decision at 9:15 PM on July 1. She was ordered to surrender right away earlier on July 1 by Gujarat High Court Justice Nirzar Desai.
After receiving interim bail from the supreme court in September of last year, Setalvad was released from prison.
The court attempted to imprison Setalvad after finding that he had undertaken efforts to topple a democratically elected government and damage the reputation of current Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who was the chief minister at the time.
In a complaint filed by Ahmedabad crime branch police, Setalvad, former Gujarat Director General of Police R B Sreekumar, and ex-IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt were all detained in June of last year for allegedly falsifying evidence to frame “innocent people” in the cases stemming from the Godhra riots.
The high court noted in its ruling that it seemed from the outset that Setalvad had filed “false and fabricated affidavits before the Supreme Court with a view to unseat the establishment and to tarnish the image of establishment and the then chief minister (Modi)” by using her close friends and riot victims.
