Youth Congress protest at AI Summit a political dissent, not organised crime: Delhi court grants bail to 9

A Delhi court has granted bail to nine Indian Youth Congress (IYC) activists who were earlier arrested by Delhi Police in connection with protests at the India AI Impact summit last month.

Judicial Magistrate First Class (JMFC) Ravi of the Patiala House Court ordered the release of Krishna Hari, Narshimha Yadav, Kundan Kumar Yadav, Ajay Kumar Singh, Jitendra Singh Yadav, Raja Gurjar, Ajay Kumar Vimal Bantu, Saurabh Singh and Arbaz Khan, according to a report by legal news website, Bar and Bench.

In the order on Sunday, the judge held that the Youth Congress’s protest amounted to “political dissent”, not “recidivist violence or organised crime”.

“The protest, at its highest, constituted symbolic political critique during a public event: T-shirts with leadership imagery, non-incitement slogans bereft of communal/regional taint, and transient assembly. No evidence discloses property defacement, or delegate panic; exit was orderly via escort,” the Court said.

Last week, IYC national president Uday Bhanu Chib was arrested in connection with the party's “shirtless protest” at the AI Impact Summit.

Uday Bhanu Chib was arrested under multiple sections of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS) in connection with the protest at Bharat Mandapam.

Chib was arrested by the Delhi Police on Tuesday, who described him as the “main conspirator” and “mastermind” behind the 20 February protest at the summit venue.

The IYC protest

Some members of the Indian Youth Congress staged a protest at the Bharat Mandapam venue of the AI Impact India Summit in Delhi on 20 February, removing their shirts and holding banners that read, “Compromised PM”.

The IYC workers marched inside the Exhibition Hall No. 5, wearing or holding white T-shirts with images of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump printed on them, along with slogans such as "India-US Trade Deal", "Epstein Files" and "PM is compromised", soon resulting in a commotion.

In Sunday’s order, released nine IYC workers on bail, Judge Ravi said that prolonged pre-trial detention, bereft of any investigative necessity, violates the right to liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution.

Police have so far made fourteen arrests in connection with the case, and accused them of breaching security and raising alleged “anti-national” slogans at the venue.

The Court noted that none of the criminal provisions invoked against the accused carried a punishment exceeding seven years' imprisonment. It rejected the Police’s argument that the sentence may run consecutively.

The Court said the police’s argument was “bereft of jurisprudential moorings at this interlocutory bail juncture, where the judicial gaze is riveted not on the mirage of potential conviction but on the stark realities of pre-trial liberty”.

“Pre-trial detention, severed from any imperative necessity and devoid of persisting investigative demands, ineluctably devolves into an illicit premptive punishment antecedent to conviction - a profound aberration fundamentally at odds with the bedrock axioms of criminal jurisprudence, which exalt liberty as the governing norm and incarceration as the narrowly circumscribed exception,” the Judge added.

The prosecution had argued that the protests by the accused posed a threat to national security, international relations and national integrity by disrupting a high-profile global event.

(With inputs from Bar and Bench)