In a cluster of orders that read as one sustained argument, a Gurugram sessions court has taken apart the prosecution’s theory in the Manesar labour unrest. Demanding higher wages, the judge held, is no offence.Additional Sessions Judge Dr Gagan Geet Kaur freed the union leader Ajit Singh on May 18. On May 30 she granted bail to three more men accused in the same case: Vivek Kumar, Raj Kumar and Shyambir.The grants are individually unremarkable. But read as a sequence, they amount to a finding that the case against the protesters was, at its core, a case against protest.The matter arises from the violence of April 9 at Richa Global Exports, a textile unit in the Industrial Model Township at Manesar. On the complaint of its human resources head, police booked unnamed rioters for attempt to murder, rioting, arson, criminal conspiracy and damage to public property, under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023 and the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act, 1984. A mob of 200 to 250 workers, the police alleged, pelted managerial staff and officers with stones, set company and government vehicles ablaze, and beat two women employees.A bail court, however, questions whether the State has shown, even prima facie, that the particular accused before it did these things. On that question, the case unravelled in open court.The public prosecutor conceded that Ajit Singh was not at the site on the day of the violence. The State’s residual theory was incitement, that he had inflamed the workers beforehand through a WhatsApp group and public speeches. Yet, he neither worked at Richa Global nor belonged to its workers’ group. He is general secretary of the union at Bellsonica, a separate auto-components plant, an affiliation that placed him outside the very group the police said had hatched the plot.Also read: From Wage Protest to ‘Conspiracy’: How Noida Workers’ Struggle Was CriminalisedWhen the investigating officer played the video of Singh’s speech in court on May 16, the judge found in it nothing beyond an appeal about wages outpaced by the cost of daily needs. The prosecutor asked for time to produce more videos. He returned with a transcript of an April 4 speech and conceded, again, that it disclosed nothing incriminating. Only then did the judge rule. A union member who raises the issue of low pay in a democratic manner, she held, commits no offence, and custody since April 13 on no evidence was illegal. “Making demand to raise their wages… is not an offence,” the order records.Vivek Kumar, a 24-year-old worker at the neighbouring Modelama Exports, and Raj Kumar were accused of having thrown stones, their phone-tower locations fixing them at the spot. Their counsel, advocate Shahrukh Alam, did not contest their presence. She argued that presence at a lawful wage protest is no crime, that nothing was recovered from either man, and that guilt cannot be pinned, on CCTV footage alone, on one face in a crowd of more than 200.The judge accepted each limb. Specific attribution, she held, cannot be drawn from CCTV in so large a crowd, and the medical reports on the injured police disclosed no intent to kill. Raising a wage demand against rising prices, she wrote, “is not an offence itself”. Whether the day’s violence flowed from conspiracy or from some other cause was a matter for trial. No purpose was served by jailing the men meanwhile. She rested the conclusion on settled authority, citing the Supreme Court in Sanjay Chandra v. CBI for the rule that bail is the norm and detention the exception, and Arnesh Kumar v. State of Bihar for the principle that arrest must answer a genuine investigative need, not reflex.Crowd offences invite collective blame, and the conspiracy charge is built to spread it. By insisting that the camera identify the individual act, the court restored the ordinary burden the prosecution had hoped the crowd would dissolve.What lifts the orders above an ordinary grant of bail is the refusal of deference. Gravity of charge is the usual lever by which liberty is denied at the trial court rung, where most of it is in fact won or lost. Here the judge declined to let the length of the charge sheet stand in for evidence, applying the bail provision of the new Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita. The charges, defence counsel noted, carried a ceiling of seven years for all but the gravest count, a fact that itself weighed against continued custody.The third order, for Shyambir, turns from the evidence to the arrests. Like Singh, he was not named in the first information report, did not work at Richa Global, and was not in its WhatsApp group. The State leaned on a co-accused’s disclosure statement, a category of evidence of slender worth, and a photograph of a gathering. His counsel, advocate Vrinda Grover, pressed that the grounds of his arrest were never furnished, in breach of Article 22(1) of the Constitution. Finding no prima facie evidence, the judge freed him on parity with co-accused already on bail.That lapse was flagged at the outset. On April 13 the duty magistrate took strict notice of the failure to communicate grounds of arrest and marked an inquiry into the investigating officer’s conduct. Reporting on the case has since revealed that the recorded “intimation” of one arrest was a call to a number belonging to the accused’s own lawyer, who said no such call reached him.Also read: Noida Protests: Arrested Activists Tell Supreme Court Police Were on WhatsApp Group, Had a Role in Inciting ViolenceRead together, the orders puncture a template that has grown routine. A wage protest turns disorderly. Grave, largely non-bailable charges are heaped on a roster of the named and the unnamed. Known organisers are recast as masterminds operating by WhatsApp. Arrests follow, at times without the grounds the law demands, and pre-trial custody performs the punitive work that no conviction has authorised.The pattern is not new to Manesar. The town remembers the 2012 violence at the Maruti Suzuki plant, which left a manager dead and sent scores of workers to jail, a memory that shadows every labour prosecution here. It surfaced again in Noida, days after Manesar, where similar wage protests drew a wave of arrests.The irony is sharp. Both state governments met the unrest with money and prosecutions at once. Haryana revised a minimum wage frozen since 2015, with effect from April 1, even as its police pressed conspiracy charges. The revised floor for unskilled work, about Rs 15,000 a month, still fell short of the roughly Rs 23,000 the unions had sought. Uttar Pradesh, too, announced higher wages after the Noida arrests. The concession admitted the grievance. The prosecution called the grievance a crime.None of this means the violence did not happen, or that bail is acquittal. The judge said so, recording that her orders bear nothing on the merits, which await trial. Vehicles burned and police were hurt on April 9, and the authorship of that violence remains open. What the orders settle is narrower and weightier. The State cannot convert the demand for a living wage into proof of conspiracy. Nor can it jail those who make it on a theory it cannot, even at the threshold, sustain.A closing detail resists improvement as metaphor. The court that issued these orders had no courtroom. Fire had gutted the building, and the judge heard the pleas in a state guest house nearby. The setting was makeshift, the reasoning exact. According to the union that took up Singh’s cause, she observed from the bench that if invoking “Inquilab Zindabad” were a crime, the system should be ashamed. The line appears in no written order. It did not need to.