Kolkata: Calcutta High Court on Tuesday rejected the bail application by former education minister Partha Chatterjee and four others accused in the teacher recruitment case.
Turning down the pleas, Justice Tapabrata Chakraborty said: “A crime of this nature would definitely fall in the category of offenses which travel far ahead of personal or private wrong.” The judge also held that “the guarantee under Article 21 embraces both the life and liberty of the accused as well as the interest of the victim and cannot be alienated from each other with levity”.
The bail applications of Chatterjee and the others came for hearing before the court of Justice Chakraborty after a division bench of justices Arijit Banerjee and Apurba Sinha Ray differed on Nov 20.
Justice Banerjee had observed that the right to a speedy trial was now recognized as a fundamental right of an undertrial under Article 21 of the Constitution. “… an undertrial cannot be kept in incarceration for an indefinite period of time in denial of his fundamental right to personal liberty,” he observed.
Justice Sinha Ray, in the same sitting, on the contrary, had relied upon the Supreme Court judgment that held that bail should not be granted to the accused till the conclusion of the trial, even if he was languishing in judicial custody for more than five years, except by the HC. Justice Ray cited cases where the court had to make an exception to the “bail is the rule, jail is the exception” principle.
Justice Chakraborty on Tuesday agreed with Justice Sinha Ray and turned down the bail pleas of Chatterjee and former West Bengal School Service Commission (WBSSC) chairperson Subires Bhattacharya, former SSC advisor Santi Prasad Sinha, former West Bengal Board of Secondary Education president Kalyanmoy Ganguly and former WBSSC secretary Ashok Kumar Saha.
Justice Chakraborty, in his order, noted that the decision towards grant of sanction from the chief secretary to CBI to start proceedings against government officers was still awaited. “In the said conspectus and considering the State’s inertia to take a decision as regards sanction, Justice Sinha Ray found probable causes for believing that the nexus of the petitioners with the State cannot be ruled out and rightly refused bail to the petitioners,” he observed. .