Mangaluru: Over ten months after the Mumbai police booked nine students from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) for arranging a memorial event for Delhi University professor G.N. Saibaba, a Mumbai sessions court on Friday (August 7) denied pre-arrest bail to two of the nine students. Within hours, the police arrested one of them, in a case that the court, by its own admission, had observed hardly amounts to a “crime”, and yet denied two of them pre-arrest bail.Kamakhya Prasad Das (23) from Assam and Abhirup Paul (32) from West Bengal had attended a memorial meetup for Saibaba at TISS’s Mumbai campus, along with seven other students, in October last year. Paul, who works in Mumbai after having obtained his Master’s degree from TISS, was arrested on the night of August 7 and produced before a magistrate’s court in Mumbai on August 8. Despite the police seeking his custody for ten days, the court granted only a day’s custody.In a rather strange order, Sessions Judge V.B. Bohra granted bail to seven others named as accused in the case, but refused it to Das and Paul on the grounds that they had not shown “respect” for the law – an act that in itself is not a recognised offence under Indian law.The memorial meetup was a peaceful get-together where only nine students gathered, lit candles and recited Saibaba’s poems. At the meetup, a few students also held placards with the message “Rest in Power (since 1967-forever),” in Saibaba’s memory.The court, while denying pre-arrest bail to the duo, observed that while offering homage to Saibaba in itself can’t be held as illegal, the two former TISS students had also raised slogans seeking the release of student activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, who are facing long incarceration without trial in the Delhi riots case.In the order, for most allegations levelled against the students, the court observes that the act in itself doesn’t qualify as a crime – yet it rejected their plea for the pre-arrest bail.There was nothing extraordinary about this meetup. Several rights organisations and students at different universities across the country had held similar events locally. Not just that – at one such memorial event, former Chief Justice (retd) of the Odisha high court S. Muralidhar, even spoke on Saibaba’s contributions, his long-drawn trial and subsequent acquittal by the Bombay high court, and his untimely death caused by several health complications he developed during prolonged incarceration.Saibaba, who had over 90% disability, was a professor of English at Delhi University.Defence lawyer Vijay Hiremath, representing the students, had referred to Muralidhar’s speech, which was later published in The Wire as an article. Hiremath also referred to another discussion hosted by The Wire where former Supreme Court Justices Madan B. Lokur (now chairperson of the UN Internal Justice Council) and Sudhanshu Dhulia dispassionately discussed the implications that the rejection of Khalid and Imam’s bail applications have for personal liberties and the fundamental right to a speedy trial under Article 21.“When retired judges of the Supreme Court are discussing these bail orders and long incarceration of intellectuals, how can seeking release of activists be termed as a crime?” Hiremath asked.Sessions Judge Bohra, however, observed: “Being students, it was expected from accused persons to respect the Law of Land” – a rather strange take in a country where long people’s movements have led to amendments and overhauls of the criminal justice system from time to time.Saibaba’s excruciatingly long incarceration and the many health complications that followed are well documented – many in the letters and articles he wrote while in jail, and many more in the form of petitions and complaints to the courts and rights forums. His trial and appeal took over a decade, and finally, he, along with four others, was acquitted by the Nagpur bench of the Bombay high court on March 4, 2024.The same year, on October 12, he died owing to an infection he developed while undergoing treatment in a hospital in Hyderabad.The defendants, in their pre-arrest bail application, stressed the time the trial and his final acquittal took. The sessions court, however, deemed them to have ‘blamed’ the procedure followed by the criminal court.“The tenor of the submissions made by accused shows that, they are questioning or blaming the procedure followed by the Criminal Court. Certain procedure is to be followed for completing the criminal trial. Apart from various reasons including population-Judge ratio, heavy pendency before the Courts of Law, is one of the reason for delay in completing a criminal trial. He was in jail, because the trial was going on and ultimately the Trial Court had convicted him. In the appeal, he came to be acquitted (sic),” the court observed.Judge Bohra, referring to the proceedings in his own court, said, “This proceeding is one of the instance. Though, as per the Guidelines of the Hon’ble Apex Court of India, an application for pre-arrest bail is to be disposed off by the Court within six weeks, this Court could not follow the same in view of heavy pendency before it.”Pendency of cases, especially bail applications, has marred the Indian criminal justice system for long. Several Supreme Court judgements have focussed on this issue and have, from time to time, issued guidelines. The Law Commission of India too has addressed the staggering pendency and backlog of court cases in its 14th, 120th and 245th reports. So, pointing to pendency and delay is more of a factual argument than merely a blame game.Although Saibaba was exonerated of all charges, the court, calling it a “matter of record,” said on Friday, “He [Saibaba] is said to be active member of the Front of CPI [Communist Party of India] (Maoist), which was banned by the Government of India.”The prosecution in the TISS case has claimed that both Das and Paul had downloaded books allegedly authored by members of the banned CPI (Maoist) group. Neither the police nor the court claim these books were banned.Hiremath, in his argument, besides pointing to the obvious fact of it not being banned literature, also argued that as students they are bound to read all kinds of books to be able to accept or reject any form of political thinking. “Isn’t that what students are supposed to be doing?” he told The Wire.The court, however, observed that “this [act of downloading literature] appeared that they are allegedly inspired by the thinking or ideology of Maoist.” The court, while repeatedly harping on the fact that it doesn’t need to make a detailed analysis of the evidence or material on record at the time of adjudicating an application for pre-arrest bail, still recorded the police’s generic allegations that both Das and Paul had “allegedly tried to change the mindset of other students of the institute” and that “the nature of those materials found instigating and aiding illegal activities including division of the Country”.