Ahmedabad court adjourns bail hearing of Teesta Setalvad, ex-DGP Sreekumar to July 15

Public prosecutor Mitesh Amin contended that an “FIR is no encyclopaedia” and that the prosecution, through the investigating officer in the case, wants to file an affidavit contending the bail pleas, requesting the court to post the matter for July 16.

Judge Thakkar has now kept the matter for arguments on July 15.

Notably, apart from citing a paragraph from the Supreme Court judgment that had observed that “all those involved in such abuse of process, need to be in the dock and proceeded with in accordance with law”, in the FIR lodged against Setalvad, former IPS officer Sanjiv Bhatt and retired DGP RB Sreekumar, the FIR has also verbatim cited several SIT submissions that were made before the Supreme Court to assign specific roles to the three who have been booked.

Setalvad, Bhatt and Sreekumar are facing charges of criminal conspiracy, forgery and under other sections of the Indian Penal Code on the basis of an FIR lodged in the Detection of Crime Branch police station in Ahmedabad on June 25 based on a complaint by inspector Darshansinh Barad, which quotes extensively from the Supreme Court’s order. Setalvad and Sreekumar were arrested in relation to the FIR on June 25. The two were then sent to judicial custody at Sabarmati Central Jail in Ahmedabad by an Ahmedabad magisterial court of MV Chauhan on July 2 following completion of six-day police remand.

Setalvad, in her bail plea, has submitted that “there is no direction in the order of the SC, specifically directing any proceedings to be taken out” against her. It has also been submitted that during the police remand period, Setalvad had already given access to her and her organisation Citizens for Justice and Peace (CJP)’s email IDs and the investigating agency has downloaded all the data from those email IDs. It has been further submitted that the FIR “prima facie does not even contain sufficient ingredients necessary to constitute the offences as mentioned” and the FIR has been “hastily registered without even claiming to scrutinise the records and proceedings of the respective trial courts along with the findings which have attained finality in the appeal proceedings before the Gujarat HC” with respect to allegations of fabricating affidavits of riot victims.

Moreover, it has been pointed out that the present FIR is a second FIR which is an “impermissibility in law” as an FIR pertaining to similar allegations based upon a complaint by an ex-employee of CJP, Rais Khan, was already lodged at Navrangpura police station in August 2011 and an Ahmedabad court had granted Setalvad anticipatory bail in this regard at the time.

Making a case for the grant of bail, Setalvad has also argued in her plea that she is a permanent resident of Mumbai, is a journalist, has been awarded the Padma Shri and other awards, and that she is a 60-year-old woman suffering from severe asthma.