Bombay High Court seeks NIA’s response to Varavara Rao’s plea seeking permission for cataract surgery in Hyderabad

In February 2021, the high court granted him medical bail for six months. Though it was extended from time to time, the high court in April 2022 rejected his prayer for permanent bail and asked him to surrender within three months. The Supreme Court then deleted the condition to surrender but directed that he should not leave Mumbai without the NIA special court’s nod.

After the Supreme Court order, Rao approached a special NIA court seeking to travel and stay in his hometown Hyderabad for three months for medical treatment. The special court rejected the plea on September 23, after which Rao challenged the order in the high court in November.

Rao, in his plea filed through advocate R Sathyanarayanan, stated the trial court failed to consider the grounds on which he sought permission and that the surgery in Mumbai was expensive. Rao claimed that in Telangana, he was entitled to free medical treatment as he is a pension holder.

The application contended that his family members are doctors and one of them is an ophthalmologist who can provide better care to him. The plea added that Rao’s experience with government hospitals in Mumbai had been abysmal and the same was considered by the high court while granting him temporary medical bail in 2021 and that the private hospitals are costly, where he cannot afford cataract operations, and therefore he needed to travel to Hyderabad.

He also added that till October 2022, out of six discharge pleas filed by him, only one of them was heard and thereafter prosecution’s arguments would be heard. He added that the chargesheet in the case was nearly 20,000 pages and contained several witness statements and that commencement of the trial would take a long time.

The plea said Rao had not filed a discharge application and had no role to play in the time-consuming process. He added that the rejection of his plea by a special court was “sheer abuse of process”. “It would have been better to direct Rao to remain present on the date when the matter could be fixed for framing of charge. This will take at least three more months and by then the treatment will be complete,” the application read.

Rao added that the special court “totally ignored” all the said grounds and he had never misused his liberty while he had been on medical bail since March 6, 2021.

The high court will hear Rao’s plea next on January 16.