‘Has efficacious remedies’: Supreme Court junks bail plea of Manish Sisodia, says could have approached HC

CJI Chandrachud too said that if parties start approaching the top court without exhausting other remedies available to them, then every case will land directly in SC. “The petitioner has efficacious remedies under the Criminal Procedure Code. We are not inclined to entertain the petition under this stage,” the bench ordered junking the plea.

Representing Sisodia, senior advocate A M Singhvi urged SC to ask the trial court to decide the bail plea expeditiously. “Because if I go there, there is a problem of delay,” he told the bench.

Solicitor General Tushar Mehta appearing for CBI, however, opposed the request saying the agency will be seeking remand.

Sisodia had cited the case of arrest of journalist Arnab Goswami and the case against another journalist Vinod Dua. But the court said these cases stood on a different footing.

“Arnab travelled to this court from a judgement of the Bombay High Court. Dua’s case was a case involving freedom of speech and expression where a journalist, albeit in the electronic space, his rights to express himself in terms of handling the Covid-19 pandemic were sought to be, according to him, curtailed by recourse to the law of sedition. That’s a very different circumstance. Here you have a full remedy which is open to you either in the form of bail before the competent court, section 482 before the Delhi High Court,” said CJI Chandrachud.

Section 482 of the CrPC deals with the inherent powers of the High Courts and says that “nothing in this Code shall be deemed to limit or affect the inherent powers of the High Court to make such orders as may be necessary to give effect to any order under this Code, or to prevent abuse of the process of any Court or otherwise to secure the ends of justice”.

Sisodia, who was arrested on Sunday in connection with alleged corruption in the now-scrapped excise policy in the national capital, has been sent to five-day CBI custody by Delhi’s Rouse Avenue court.