Universal principle of Criminal Justice is that a person is innocent till found guilty. It means no one’s freedom should be abridged till he is charged and convicted by a competent court. Indian prisons have colossal number of under-trials who await their trials, but are languishing in jails. They are tortured, not allowed to meet their family members and generally treated as criminals.
India is perhaps one of the few countries where undertrials are worse off than those convicted. As of 2019, undertrial prisoners form 70% of the prison population in India. A majority of undertrials, about 65%, are from scheduled tribes, other backward classes, marginalised and vulnerable groups having no means to fight to get bail.
Several judgements have upheld the right of undertrials to a speedy trial, legal aid etc. But undertrial prisoners continue to increase unabated. The reason for this inhuman state of affairs is the gross disregard of the legal position and judicial decisions by police authorities, lower judiciary and prison administration. Thus we need to focus on effective implementation of legal framework to ameliorate the misery of undertrials in India.
First step in this direction is to mandate bail in all cases in which the history of the undertrial does not contain any hard-core criminal record or prima facie proof of involvement in terror attacks.
Let us take few tragic cases in which a person was held in jail for many years as under trial merely on suspicion for a long time and found innocent.
The most tragic case of Kobad Ghandi. A product of Doon School, St Xavier’s College, Mumbai, a Chartered Accountant from UK spent 10 years in prison before he was found innocent and acquitted.
Mohammad Ali Bhat, a shawl trader in Nepal, just 25, was kept in jail in Delhi and Rajasthan as accused in Lajpat Nagar and Samlethi blast cases for 22 years before he was declared innocent by Rajasthan High Court.
Police in Bijnor, UP, imprisoned Bala Singh for a murder he did not commit even though his mother a daily wage labourer pleaded that police was mistaking Bala for her other son. He was set free after 10 years.
There are many innocent persons who were kept in jail for a long time pending their trial and who were found innocent. In most democracies, people .are jailed only after conviction. But in India, jails are packed with undertrials more than the convicts; people imprisoned even before they have been proven guilty. They are freed only when they are proved not guilty.
Making a scathing observation forty years ago, the Supreme Court had said the high prevalence of undertrials in jail is crying shame of the judicial system as it permits imprisonment of people for long periods even without trial commencing in many cases.
Except in cases in which the prisoner has a record of a hard core criminal, bail must be made automatic after 30 days. Breach of this mandate should be considered a criminal offence leading to appropriate punishment.
We the People 