Supreme Court sets aside cancellation of bail of All India Hindu Parishad Member Kara Ratheesh by Kerala HC

  • Shruti Kakkar
  • 10:50 PM, 08 Jun 2021

Read Time: 06 minutes

The Supreme Court on Tuesday set aside the Kerala High Court (“HC”) order dated March 18, 2021 whereby the court cancelled the bail of a man belonging to All India Hindu Parishad Member Kara Ratheesh in an attempt-to-murder case.

Bench of Justices Navin Sinha and Ajay Rastogi said that two other cases based on which bail of Ratheesh was cancelled related to a protest and stopping the shooting of a film outside a temple.

While taking note of the fact that Ratheesh was on bail for nearly three years before which the High Court cancelled his bail for violation of bail conditions, the Court said that, “We are unable to sustain the High Court’s order”.

Appearing for Ratheesh, Senior Advocate R Basant said that the petitioner was head of All India Hindu Parishad and was booked in the two cases related to protests in which many other people were also involved.

Opposing Ratheesh’s bail, the State Government on the other hand submitted that a charge sheet was filed in one case and that Ratheesh had breached one of the bail conditions by getting involved in other two cases.

The Kerala HC allowed the application under second proviso to Section 389(1) of the Code of Criminal Procedure and cancelled the bail granted to the petitioner for not adhering to the conditions of bail vide order dated March 21, 2018particularly when he was shown getting involved in two further criminal cases after the High Court suspended the execution of his sentence in the present case with the condition that he would not get involved in any other offence and while providing that breach of this condition would result in cancellation of bail.

Earlier, the top court on May 25, 2021 while observing that, “It is true that there had not been any specific direction in the impugned order to the petitioner to surrender but the fact of the matter remains that the High Court had consciously cancelled the bail granted to him after taking into account the allegations of the State that after suspension of execution of sentence with the condition that he would not get involved in any other offence, the petitioner was found involved in the said two cases in Crime No. 1134 of 2020 of Perumbavoor Police Station, Kerala and Crime No. 0836 of 2019 of Kalady Police Station, Kerala.” directed the petitioner to surrender before the police. 

Directions were also issued to the police to conduct the process without prejudice to the submissions sought made on petitioner’s behalf of the petitioner in the plea seeking leave to appeal.

The bench of Justice Dinesh Maheshwari and Justice Aniruddha Bose had also issued notice to seek state government’s response on Ratheesh’s plea challenging Kerala High Court order.