A Delhi court has granted bail to nine Indian Youth Congress (IYC) activists who were earlier arrested by the Delhi Police in connection with protests at the India AI Impact summit last month.
Judicial Magistrate First Class (JMFC) Ravi of the Patiala House Court ordered the release of Krishna Hari, Narshimha Yadav, Kundan Kumar Yadav, Ajay Kumar Singh, Jitendra Singh Yadav, Raja Gurjar, Ajay Kumar Vimal Bantu, Saurabh Singh and Arbaz Khan, according to a report by a legal news website, Bar and bench.
Read also | Youth Congress chief Uday Bhanu Chib was arrested for protesting at the AI summit
In Sunday’s order, the judge said the Youth Congress protest amounted to “political dissent” and not “recidivist violence or organized crime”.
“The protest at its highest was symbolic political criticism during a public event: t-shirts with the image of the leadership, slogans without incitement devoid of communal/regional filth, and a transient assembly. No evidence reveals defacement of property or panic of delegates; the departure was arranged through an escort,” the court said.
Last week, IYC National President Uday Bhanu Chib was arrested in connection with the party’s “shirtless protest” at the AI Impact Summit.
Uday Bhanu Chib was arrested under several sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) in connection with the Bharat Mandapam protest.
Chib was arrested on Tuesday by the Delhi Police, who described him as the “main conspirator” and “mastermind” of the February 20 protest at the summit venue.
IYC protest
Some members of the Indian Youth Congress staged a protest at the Bharat Mandapam where the AI Impact India Summit was held in Delhi on February 20, taking off their shirts and holding placards that read: “Compromised PM“.
Read also | Who is Uday Bhanu Chib? Youth Congress chief arrested for AI summit protest
IYC workers marched into Exhibition Hall No. 5 wearing white t-shirts with pictures on them Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump printed on them along with slogans like ‘India-US Trade Deal’, ‘Epstein Files’ and ‘PM is compromised’, which soon resulted in an uproar.
Ordering the bail of the nine IYC workers on Sunday, Justice Ravi said the prolonged remand, devoid of any need for investigation, violated the right to liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution.
The police have so far arrested fourteen people in connection with the case and accused them of breaching security and raising alleged “anti-national” slogans at the site.
The court noted that none of the criminal provisions applied against the accused imposes a sentence exceeding seven years of imprisonment. He rejected the police’s argument that the sentence could run consecutively.
The court said the police’s argument was “free from jurisprudential moorings at this point of pretrial bail, where judges’ gaze is not tied to the specter of a potential conviction but to the stark reality of pretrial freedom.”
“Detached from any pressing necessity and stripped of the continuing requirements of investigation, remand inevitably devolves into illegal pre-sentence preventive punishment – a profound deviation that is fundamentally at odds with the fundamental axioms criminal jurisprudencewhich highlight freedom as the governing norm and imprisonment as a narrowly defined exception,” the judge added.
At most, the protest was symbolic political criticism during a public event.
The prosecution alleged that the accused’s protests posed a threat to national security, international relations and national integrity by disrupting a major global event.
(With inputs from Bar and Bench)
