NEW DELHI: Supreme Court judge Justice PK Mishra on Wednesday recused himself from hearing a bail plea filed by former JNU student leader Umar Khalid seeking bail in a UAPA case related to the alleged conspiracy behind the 2020 Delhi riots.
Directing the matter to be listed before a bench on August 17, a bench of Justices AS Bopanna and PK Mishra said in its order, “Matter can’t be taken up in this combination of the bench. List on 17th August.”
When the matter was taken up for hearing, Justice Bopanna, while drawing the attention of Senior Advocate Kapil Sibal and Advocate Rajat Nair to Justice Mishra’s difficulty in hearing the matter, said, “This will come before some other bench. There is some difficulty for my brother to take up this.”
Khalid had approached the apex court against Delhi HC’s order rejecting his bail. Upholding the order dated March 24, 2022, passed by the lower court rejecting his bail, Justices Rajnish Bhatnagar and Siddharth Mridul had said that there appeared to be a premeditated conspiracy for causing disruptive chakka-jam and pre-planned protests at different planned sites in Delhi, which was engineered to escalate to confrontational chakka-jam, incitement to violence and culminate in riots in natural course on specific dates.
“Protests and riots prima-facie seem to be orchestrated at the conspiratorial meetings held from December 2019 to February 2020,” it added.
The bench had said that the protest planned was “not a typical protest” normal in political culture or democracy but one far more destructive and injurious geared towards extremely grave consequences.
Notably, the SC had, on May 16, sought the response of Delhi police and posted the pleas to be heard after six weeks.
The police had booked Khalid and his associates on September 13, 2020, under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and provisions of the IPC.
‘BILKIS BANO CASE: MULTIPLE PILS AGAINST CONVICTS’ RELEASE SETS DANGEROUS PRECEDENT’
Entertaining Public Interest Litigations (PILs) challenging the release of convicts in the Bilkis Bano gangrape case by parties other than the victim will set a dangerous precedent, the Supreme Court was told on Wednesday. Advocate Rishi Malhotra appearing on behalf of one of the convicts, while raising serious objections and drawing the attention of Justices BV Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan to the “criminal nature” of the proceedings, said, “So far as merits of the petition go, this is highly speculative. They don’t annex the order of remission and say it is wrong, it is bad in law. Deserves to be dismissed.” Senior Advocate Siddharth Luthra, representing another convict, said that a “third element cannot exist” in a criminal matter. Referring to some of the pleas filed by two politicians, Luthra said, “There is a consistent view in relation to criminal proceedings that there will be no third-party intervention or interference.”