The Supreme Court on Friday granted bail to journalist Siddique Kappan, 711 days after he was arrested by the Uttar Pradesh police for allegedly seeking to instigate communal riots in Hathras where a Dalit woman was gang-raped and murdered.
A three-judge bench headed by Chief Justice of India (CJI) Uday Umesh Lalit ordered Kappan to be produced before the concerned trial court within three days. Upon his release, he will remain in Delhi for the first six months and will thereafter be allowed to proceed to his home in Kerala. During the entire period of bail, the order requires him to report once a week to the local police station , Nizamuddin (Delhi) and Malappuram (Kerala).
Kappan was arrested on October 6, 2020 near Hathras and charged of serious offences of criminal conspiracy and terror funding under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). His bail plea was rejected by the Lucknow bench of the Allahabad high court on August 2. Early this week, the Uttar Pradesh government filed an affidavit accusing Kappan of using journalism as a cover to propagate activities of the Muslim extremist group Popular Front of India (PFI).
The Uttar Pradesh government scrambled to contain the fallout of the gang rape of the Dalit woman (she died four days later on account of injuries suffered during the assault) by cremating her body past midnight, and placing a police cordon around her village to prevent leaders of opposition parties from visiting her family.
{{/usCountry}}The Uttar Pradesh government scrambled to contain the fallout of the gang rape of the Dalit woman (she died four days later on account of injuries suffered during the assault) by cremating her body past midnight, and placing a police cordon around her village to prevent leaders of opposition parties from visiting her family.
{{/usCountry}}Kappan’s wife Raihanath, who was present outside the court with her three children, said, “I am very happy today. For the past two years, the humiliation and financial distress that I faced cannot be explained. I am grateful that the court understood what my husband went through and exposed the UP government.”
Senior advocate Mahesh Jethmalani, who appeared for the state, opposed Kappan’s bail. He relied on the literature allegedly found from the car in which Kappan was travelling to Hathras along with other co-accused .
The bench, also comprising justices S Ravindra Bhat and PS Narasimha, questioned the evidentiary value of this material. It wished to know if the same was discovered from Kappan’s custody, how to prove it was used to propagate violence, and if anything provocative was contained in it.
The bench told Jethmalani: “Every person has a right to freedom of expression. He is trying to propagate an idea which he feels is necessary. We have seen how protests took place at India Gate following the Nirbhaya incident (gang rape of a Delhi woman in 2012) after which there was a change in law. What he seeks is to propagate his views. Will that be a crime in the eyes of law?”
Jethmalani read out a material seized from the custody of the other co-accused, and said, “He (Kappan) is a member of PFI (Popular Front of India, an extremist Islamist group) and look at what he was out to do. There are detailed instructions on how to instigate riots and escape without being caught. It also contained how to act when police are using tear gas.”
In one portion of the material, the court noted the words “black people” in the literature and pointed out to Jethmalani that the literature seemed “to belong to some foreign country. If it was to be circulated in a local area (Hathras), which language was it in?” The material was in English and Jethmalani said that this was because the accused spoke English.
Kappan’s lawyer and senior advocate Kapil Sibal told the court that the documents were unrelated to India. “This material is not from me. They have picked it up from Phoenix and San Diego in the US. This is not prosecution, but persecution,” he said.
The court refused to enter into the debate and said it was merely adjudicating the matter of bail.
It went on to grant Kappan bail based on the facts of this case and because he was in custody for nearly two years.
Kappan was charged under sections 17 (raising funds for terrorist act) and 18 (criminal conspiracy) of UAPA, besides sedition (Section 124A) and other offences under the Indian Penal Code (IPC). At the time of arrest, Kappan was working with Malayalam news portal Azhimukhum and claimed that he was unnecessarily linked to PFI due to his earlier stint as a journalist with a PFI-linked newspaper, Thejas.
This claim was countered by UP government which produced a statement by the editor of Azhimukhum, saying the channel did not depute him to cover the Hathras incident.
Sibal informed the court that he apprehended Kappan’s arrest in a separate case filed by the Enforcement Directorate. The court relaxed the bail conditions in the present case to enable him approach the competent court for bail.
The court imposed conditions on Kappan to deposit his passport, not to misuse his freedom by contacting any person involved with the case and to cooperate with the ongoing probe.