A Delhi court, while granting bail to nine Indian Youth Congress workers arrested in connection with the shirtless protest at the Amnesty International summit, said the protest constituted “symbolic political criticism” and that pre-trial detention could mean “preventive punishment,” news agency PTI reported.
The court noted that “the protest, at its highest, constitutes symbolic political criticism during a public event: T-shirts with images of leaders, non-inflammatory slogans free of sectarian/regional contamination, and a passing assembly. There is no evidence revealing the defacement of property, or panic of the delegates; the exit was organized through an escort.”
Judicial Magistrate First Class Ravi passed the order on Sunday while hearing the bail petitions of the nine accused – Krishna Hari, Narshimha Yadav, Kundan Kumar Yadav, Ajay Kumar Singh, Jitendra Singh Yadav, Raja Gurjar, Ajay Kumar Vimal alias Bantu, Saurabh Singh and Arbaaz Khan.
She noted that pretrial detention would be “a profound aberration that is fundamentally at odds with the basic axioms of criminal jurisprudence, which exalt liberty as the ruling rule and imprisonment as the limited exception.” Essentially, she repeated the phrase “bail as a rule, imprisonment as an exception.”
Delhi Police, which opposed the bail application, said the Constitution grants the right to peaceful protest, “but there are also certain conditions.”
It said that the accused Indian Youth Congress workers raised slogans describing the Indo-US trade deal as a “compromise”, in the presence of international media.
When the police tried to stop the defendants, they “attacked the police officers,” who were injured. Delhi Police said there was medical evidence of this.
However, the court did not agree to these requests.
IYC workers entered the AI Summit venue on February 20, wearing or carrying white T-shirts with pictures of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Donald Trump, along with slogans such as “India-US trade deal”, “Epstein files” and “PM at risk”.
The demonstrators also clashed with security forces and police officers deployed at the site.
