Kani bail may see political fallout
By granting bail to DMK MP Kanimozhi and four others on Monday the Delhi high court has set the record straight. It had shocked the country that the bail application of the young politician, an accused in the 2G spectrum case, should have been turned down by the special CBI judge on the ground that DMK supremo M. Karunanidhi’s daughter was rich and influential and could hinder the gathering of evidence.
Allowing her bail plea, Justice V.K. Shali pointedly noted that being a woman should also have been a ground for not rejecting her bail application earlier. This amounts to a rebuke of the special court judge who had held that this consideration did not apply to Ms Kanimozhi as she came from the privileged class. It says something that the clear view that bail, not jail, should be the norm first came from senior BJP leader Jaswant Singh. Subsequently, Union law minister Salman Khurshid, himself a well-known lawyer, also emphasised the point.
The grant of bail to Ms Kanimozhi six months after her incarceration, although the 2G trial has not yet opened, followed the directions of the Supreme Court to free five top businessmen on bail in the same case on November 23. Considering this, it is surprising that the high court judge did not extend the same argument to former telecom secretary Siddharth Behura when he looked at the applications of Ms Kanimozhi and the four bracketed with her. The CBI did not oppose the DMK MP’s bail plea before the high court but took a contrary view in respect of Mr Behura, saying he was a public servant charged with causing the loss of a large sum to the public exchequer. Essentially, this means that a civil servant must lose his liberty even during the period of trial. The suggestion is that Mr Behura deserves punishment even if he is found not guilty eventually. This appears contrary to the spirit of the law.
It appears that Mr Karunanidhi is now persuaded that the act of sending his daughter to jail was under the direction of the court and did not flow from any purportedly evil design of the Congress to teach his party a lesson, as had been touted by some of his partymen. In the event, the ties between the two parties, which had been strained in the wake of the 2G case, now have a better chance of being fully repaired. Should that materialise, it is not unlikely that the DMK’s public opposition to some policy moves by the UPA-2 government, of which it is a part, may be toned down, giving the Manmohan Singh government a hint of respite from trouble from its allies.
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