The Bombay High Court on Thursday ordered the release of former Delhi University (DU) professor Hany Babu, who was arrested in July 2020 in connection with the Elgar Parishad Maoist links case.
The Division Bench of Justice AS Gadkari and Justice Ranjitsinha R. Bhonsale declined the National Investigation Agency (NIA)’s request for a stay of the order, noting that continued detention in the absence of progress in the trial would be incompatible with the constitutional guarantee against arbitrary deprivation of liberty.
The former DU professor, who was arrested more than five years ago under several provisions of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, was accused of having links with the CPI (Maoist). He was also booked for participating in an alleged larger conspiracy linked to the Bhima Koregaon violence, which claimed one life in January 2018.
Babu was further accused of supporting the activities of former Delhi University professor GN Saibaba, who was convicted in a separate vcase under UAPA.
The High Court granted bail to Babu on a bail bond of Rs 1 lakh with adequate sureties.
Babu had earlier applied for bail before the Special NIA Court and the Bombay High Court. Both his petitions were rejected. In 2022, the High Court upheld the trial court’s refusal to bail. Babu challenged this verdict before the Supreme Court.
In early 2024, the Supreme Court sought the NIA’s response to his plea for regular bail but permitted him in July to approach the trial court or the High Court afresh.
Babu withdrew his special leave petition subsequently, citing changed circumstances, particularly the grant of bail by either the Supreme Court or the Bombay High Court to several co-accused, including Rona Wilson, Sudhir Dhawale, Sudha Bharadwaj, Shoma Sen, Vernon Gonsalves, Arun Ferreira and P Varavara Rao.
Before the High Court, Babu’s counsel emphasised that the trial had not advanced to the stage of framing charges and that the NIA had yet to respond substantively to his discharge application pending before the Special Court.
He invoked the constitutional doctrine against punitive pre-trial detention, drawing support from decisions such as Union of India v. K.A. Najeeb (2021), in which the Supreme Court held that even stringent statutory bars to bail under the UAPA must yield where there is inordinate delay in commencement of trial.
The defence contended that the continued incarceration of an undertrial for more than five years without meaningful progress violated Articles 14 and 21 of the Constitution.
The NIA opposed the plea, asserting that Babu’s alleged links to banned organisations and his purported involvement in a structured conspiracy justified continued detention. It maintained that replies to the discharge applications had been filed and that the Special Court intended to adjudicate all discharge pleas collectively, resulting in procedural delay.
It was also argued that Babu’s custody period was shorter than that of several co-accused who had secured bail on the ground of prolonged incarceration.
The High Court, however, was not persuaded by the agency’s request for a stay of the bail order, especially in light of the extended period of pre-trial detention and the lack of substantial progress in the trial.
The Bench implicitly relied on the evolving jurisprudence on bail in UAPA cases, which stresses that statutory restrictions under Section 43D(5) cannot override the constitutional requirement of expeditious trial or permit indefinite incarceration without adjudication.
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