SC denies stay on TMC leaders’ house arrest

NEW DELHI:: The Supreme Court on Tuesday refused to interfere with a high court order putting two Trinamool Congress (TMC) ministers and a prominent MLA under house arrest in connection with the 2016 Narada sting tapes, stating that their personal liberty and protests by chief minister Mamata Banerjee against their arrests by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) could not be conflated.

The bench of justices Vineet Saran and BR Gavai found no rationale in a CBI petition against Calcutta high court’s May 21 order of sending the accused to house-arrest and to treat it as judicial custody. It pointed out that if the agency was aggrieved by West Bengal CM Banerjee and the state law minister Moloy Ghatak’s protests, it should rather proceed against them under suitable promehta of the law, instead of citing their demonstrations as grounds to cancel the relief granted to the TMC leaders.

“We don’t appreciate such dharnas etc. But if a CM or a law minister is taking law into their own hands, should the accused be made to suffer? You can proceed against the persons who tried to take the law into their own hands... But we wouldn’t like to mix the liberty of a citizen with some acts of politicians. You can take actions available in law against the politicians but we won’t comprise the liberty of the citizens,” the bench told solicitor general Tushar Mehta, who appeared for CBI.

sought to emphasise that the rule of law was a casualty in the state as the CM sat on a protest inside the CBI office on May 17 after the TMC leaders were arrested, while the law minister camped at the CBI court with thousands of supporters. This prevented the CBI prosecutor to go to the court to oppose their bail, said the SG.

“In a bail matter, how far can we go? Liberty of a person’s has to be seen as the first thing. Conduct of others has to be seen in appropriate proceedings as and when they are initiated...we don’t support the action of the CM or the law minister but the issues are different here. Nobody is above the law...,” the bench told the SG.

Mehta, on his part, said that the May 17 order of granting bail TMC leaders Madan Mitra, Subrata Mukherjee and Firhad Hakim was vitiated since there was pressure mounted on the court by protests, and therefore, the CBI wanted the matter to be taken out of the state.

The bench, however, replied: “We don’t feel that out judiciary, including the district judiciary, is affected by mob. We can’t demoralise our judiciary by transferring the matter like this...if we transfer the matter outside the high court, we will be demoralising the high court...”

The court then gave two choices to Mehta; either withdraw the petition and go back to the Calcutta high court, where a fivejudge bench has been constituted to all the issues relating to this case, or get an order on his petition from the top court which will have to hear the lawyers for the accused and the state.

With the writing on the wall, the SG opted to withdraw the petition with liberty to raise all contentions before the five-judge bench of the high court, which is expected to take up the matter on Wednesday.

THE SC BENCH FOUND NO RATIONALE IN A CBI PETITION AGAINST CALCUTTA HC’S MAY 21 ORDER