New Delhi: Noting that pretrial detention without any imperative necessity could turn into illicit preemptive punishment, a Delhi court on Sunday (March 1) evening granted bail to nine Indian Youth Congress (IYC) members who were earlier arrested for protesting at the India AI impact summit last month, reported Bar and Bench.IYC members Krishna Hari, Narshimha Yadav, Kundan Kumar Yadav, Ajay Kumar Singh, Jitendra Singh Yadav, Raja Gurjar, Ajay Kumar Vimal @ Bantu, Saurabh Singh and Arbaz Khan were granted bail by Judicial Magistrate First Class (JMFC) Ravi of the Patiala House Court.In his order, the court ruled that the Youth Congress’s protest amounted to “political dissent”, not “recidivist violence or organised crime.”“The protest, at highest, constituted symbolic political critique during, a public event: T-shirts with leadership imagery, non-inciteful slogans bereft of communal/regional taint, and transient assembly. No evidence discloses property defacement, or delegate panic; exit was orderly via escort,” said the Court.The court observed that that prolonged pre-trial detention, bereft of any investigative necessity violates the right to liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution.Earlier, the prosecution had argued that the protests by the IYC members posed a threat to national security, international relations and national integrity by disrupting a high-profile global event.Judge Ravi also noted that none of the criminal provisions which were invoked against the IYC members carried a punishment of more than seven years in jail. It also rejected the Police’s argument that the sentence may run consecutively.The court termed the police’s argument “bereft of jurisprudential moorings at this interlocutory bail juncture, where the judicial gaze is riveted not on the mirage of potential conviction but on the stark realities of pre-trial liberty”.“Pre-trial detention, severed from any imperative necessity and devoid of persisting investigative demands, ineluctably devolves into an illicit premptive punishment antecedent to conviction – a profound aberration fundamentally a t odds with the bedrock axioms of criminal jurisprudence, which exalt liberty as the governing norm and incarceration as the narrowly circumscribed exception,” said the court, reported Bar and Bench.Members of the Indian Youth Congress had protested without shirts at the India AI Impact Summit on February 20. Some of the protesters wore T-shirts with slogans that said “PM is compromised”.