Patiala House grants bail to 17 held at the Jantar Mantar protest against Kumar

A Delhi magistrate granted bail on Monday night to 17 students and freelance journalists arrested during a protest against chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Judicial Magistrate First Class Animesh Kumar of Patiala House passed four orders between 9pm and 9:25pm. Each accused must furnish a bond of Rs 15,000 with one surety of the same amount. Delhi Police had asked the court to send the group to judicial custody for two weeks.

The court did not treat the protest as harmless. It said the allegations were serious, that one police officer had an injury recorded on a medico-legal certificate, and that assaulting an officer on duty could not be covered by the phrase peaceful protest. It then looked at the charge sheet of offences and the age of the accused. Most of the sections are bailable. Section 132 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the count the magistrate singled out, carries a maximum of two years. Section 190 is the other non-bailable provision he named. "The accused persons are of young age and does not appear to be habitual offenders. They have their entire career lying ahead," the orders say. On that basis he refused the remand.

The seventeen names

Police arrested Anshika Gupta, Karishma Mehta, Sanju, Kunjal, Rudra Pratap Singh, Rohit, Aadarsh, Sunny Deol, Brajesh Pandey, Adnan Barmare, Anuj Bhagat, Buddhashil Thaware, Gajender Singh, Dharmender, Samarth Singh, Sheikh Yunus and Aman Aggarwal on 5 October. The list mixes students and freelance journalists, which is how both Bar and Bench and LiveLaw described the group. Several were produced together, which is why four orders covered seventeen people. A joint production is common when a single demonstration produces a single set of arrests. It also means one injured officer's certificate is sitting in more than one file.

The protest was at Jantar Mantar, the city centre's designated protest ground, against Kumar and against the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. Police and paramilitary units stopped larger groups from reaching the site. Many of those stopped were detained and then released without a court appearance. The seventeen are the residue who were booked and produced. That split, a large detention and a small production, is the fact that decides who now has a criminal file and who does not.

How the orders sit next to Tuesday's march

INDIA bloc MPs marched from Parliament toward the Election Commission on Tuesday morning and were stopped on Parliament Street. Their demand, resignation of Kumar, is the same demand the Jantar Mantar group was making on Monday. The legal tracks are separate. The MPs sat on a road and had not, by midday, been booked. The seventeen already have bail conditions and a next date in a magistrate's court. A bond of Rs 15,000 with a surety is a light condition. It is still a condition, and a surety means someone else has to stand in the file.

The magistrate's sentence about careers is doing work. He is telling the police that a two-year maximum, a young accused, and no record of habit is not a case for a fortnight in custody before trial. He is also telling the accused that an injured officer keeps the case alive. Bail is not discharge. The state can still prosecute section 132. What it cannot do, on these orders, is hold them while it decides.

The commission is not a party

Kumar is the subject of the slogan and not a party to the bail. The criminal case is between the state and the seventeen, on charges arising from the conduct of the protest, not from the content of the revision. That distinction will matter if the protest cases multiply. A speech about Form 6 is not an assault. An injury on a certificate is. The court has kept both ideas in the same order, which is why the text is usable beyond this group. Any later production from the Election Commission protests will be measured against a magistrate who refused a two-week remand, named the two-year maximum, and still called an assault on an officer a serious concern.