The alacrity with which the SC reviewed petitions on the stray dog issue is in stark contrast to bail applications of nine of the 18 accused in the Delhi riots case languishing for five years
(Clockwise from top left) Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam, Meeran Haider, Athar Khan, Gulfisha Khatoon, and Khalid Saifi, six of the nine accused whose bail petitions in the 2020 Delhi riot case were rejected on September 2
I thought there would be an outcry against the inherent injustice of the Delhi High Court rejecting, on September 2, the bail applications of nine of the 18 accused in the 2020 Delhi riot case. My hope sprang from the popular anger expressed against the Supreme Court ordering, on August 11, the municipal authorities of Delhi and its adjacent cities to permanently remove stray dogs from their localities. My expectation was belied. It isn’t only out of bitterness that I state: dogs have a better chance of securing justice than Muslims.
The fury over permanently removing stray dogs presumably prompted the Supreme Court into posting for an early hearing of the review petitions filed against its August 11 order. On August 22, the Supreme Court said stray dogs must be returned to the very areas from where they were captured, after they had been sterilised, dewormed and vaccinated. The apex court took just 11 days to balance what it called the “right of the stray dogs to live on the streets” with the “safety and security of the citizens.”
The Supreme Court’s alacrity in doing justice to dogs is in sharp contrast to the snail’s pace with which the entire hierarchy of courts has tackled the bail applications of the nine accused in the Delhi riot case. Through the five years they have been in prison, their bail applications have been tossed from one bench to another in various courts, with judges recusing themselves from hearing them. Or they completed hearing the arguments but didn’t pass orders for months, before they were transferred out, leading to the bail process restarting from scratch.
The nine activists are among the 18 booked under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) for organising anti-Citizenship Amendment Act protest which, according to the State, was a conspiracy to trigger communal riots in Delhi in February 2020. Fifty-four people were killed in the violence. Could the death toll have been a factor behind the tardy progress of their bail applications, with courts reluctant to provide them relief? Could bail for them have offended public sentiment?
Dogs are infinitely more fortunate than the nine activists. Solicitor General Tushar Mehta told the Supreme Court that there were 37.17 lakh dog bites countrywide in 2024, and in “several cases, human lives were lost due to trauma and rabies infection.” And yet, the order to permanently remove them from the streets spawned a public outrage, which dissipated with the Supreme Court reversing that order on the ground of
“compassionate treatment.”
It would have been compassionate of the courts to release the nine activists as their trial has yet to begin. With 800-900 witnesses to be examined, it’d take years to determine their culpability. Shouldn’t the judiciary balance, as it did for dogs, the activists’ rights to liberty with the security of the State and people?
The exception to the compassionate treatment of dogs, the Supreme Court said, are to be those who suffer from rabies, warranting their isolation. Likewise, “bail, not jail” is the guiding judicial principle. Under the UAPA, too, an exception is made —bail is to be denied to an accused if the court were to feel that the allegation against him/her is prima facie true. It won’t be prima facie if a judge were to test the evidence against the accused for its plausibility, the Supreme Court ruled in the Watali case. Prima facie means determining whether the State’s narrative appears untrue at first impression — that is, without analysing it.
At one stroke, the Watali case placed humans and strays on the same footing, for there are no tests for determining whether a dog suffers from rabies. They can only be suspected of carrying rabies on the basis of symptoms, such as sudden, inexplicable aggression. The diagnosis of rabies in dogs is essentially a prima facie determination — and can go wrong. But it’s unlikely anyone, out of prejudice or malice, would declare a dog rabid.
Muslims are unfortunate, for there are innumerable examples of the State cooking up evidence against them. The most recent example of this was the Bombay High Court releasing 11 men who had been convicted in the 2006 Mumbai train blasts case. The High Court held they were subjected to “inhuman torture” for extracting confessions and that witness testimonies were unreliable. The 11, all Muslim, had spent 19 years in jail.
It’s to avoid such tragic denial of liberty that it becomes necessary to undertake surface-analysis for establishing the probative value of evidence the State furnishes in support of its allegations. This is what the Supreme Court judges Aniruddha Bose and Sudhanshu Dhulia did in 2023, to give bail to Vernon Gonsalves and Arun Ferreira, who are among the accused in the Bhima Koregaon case.
The Delhi High Court barely engaged in surface-analysis of evidence in the 2020 Delhi riot case. As its judgement comes up for challenge in the Supreme Court, it’s hoped the judicial principles of compassionate treatment and reconciliation of conflicting rights that were applied to dogs will also be to the nine Muslim activists, whose protest symbolised their sanity, not rabidity.
The writer is a senior journalist and author of Bhima Koregaon: Challenging Caste
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