The Proof of Guilt: The Prior Antecedents Practice Directions on Bail

A specific instance of a person who lied about his previous involvements in crime to get bail comes to the Supreme Court. Going by available empirical metrics, the person is by no means an ordinary accused who finds himself entangled in the Indian criminal justice system. I say this, because most accused persons are from socio-economically marginalised sections of society, whereas the person here claimed to be a lawyer and the head of educational institutions. 

Now, upon seeing that this extraordinary accused person—one with a lot of social and political capital, we can assume—has gamed the system and suppressed facts to get bail, any right-thinking person would be angry, even enraged. But should the sharp practices resorted to by this specific accused person, become the basis either for making observations or passing directions, that would apply to the entire gamut of accused and convicted persons who turn to courts for bail? Probably not. As bad a case of inductive reasoning as any you might see used by partisan policymakers. 

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Nobody can have any problem with the idea that courts should not be hoodwinked by a party seeking reliefs. But there are many pathways to achieve this objective of securing “transparency and integrity in bail adjudication”, as the Supreme Court puts it. Sadly, the pathway adopted by the Court in Zeba Khan is arguably the worst of the lot. It places an impossibly onerous obligation upon most accused persons, and is likely to delay adjudication of bail petitions and prolong custody, proving that the medicine is definitely worse than the disease.

Since nobody apart from defence lawyers and judges care about the rights of accused persons, surely many people would have had this idea of demanding an affidavit of clean pasts. Why not do it then? Because it just doesn’t work well enough given how the criminal justice system is structured. Discounting the fact of the accused persons who knowingly cheat the system, there are far more persons who simply have absolutely no idea about the specifics of their ‘criminal history’ as the law calls it. Whatever affidavit they may give may be incomplete. In many cases, since the accused is in custody making filing an affidavit quite difficult and time-consuming, the affidavit may be filed by their next-friend who will know even lesser. What happens in that case: Does a court assume bad faith, or not?  

That accused persons are simply in the dark is down to a mixture of the fact that most accused persons are disadvantaged and disenfranchised, and the fact that the criminal justice system is premised upon a notoriously unfair balance of power where the State holds all the cards when it comes to information. It is not mere rhetoric, but a matter of rule that accused persons are not entitled to copies of even an FIR without running through hoops. They do not get a copy or alert about warrants or other coercive processes, let alone case papers which are kept with lawyers who are frequently changed during the life of a case. 

Compare the ordinary, hapless, accused, with the leviathan which is the State in this scenario. A power to forcefully obtain biographic details about persons accused in offences has existed with the Indian State for more than a century. The most recent statutory version of this power, seen in the Criminal Procedure Identification Act 2022, provides for taking and retaining data for up to 75 years. All this data is then synchronised digitally using a system called the CCTNS. Which leads me to state the obvious: It is a lot easier for the State rather than an accused to provide details about criminal history in 21st Century India.       

For all these reasons, I am highly skeptical that the system will make any great strides towards ensuring either greater transparency or integrity in bail adjudication by this affidavit of past antecedents being filed by accused persons. What is much more likely, as is already being seen in Delhi, is that bail applications will take longer to get heard. The courts may ask police to now verify details in this affidavit — in effect, unnecessarily wasting everyone’s time because it is something that police can do at the outset. Then, if there are discrepancies, which there will be in many cases, it will give the prosecution more opportunity for time-wasting and distractions by alleging bad faith on part of an accused, requiring a court to spend time on this issue rather than the primary issue of whether a person should be in custody on allegations of having committed a crime.