Bail for the powerful, bars for the poor

On July 8, 2026, within a fortnight of a first information report (FIR) naming him in a ₹35 crore horse-trading conspiracy, former Minister V Senthil Balaji and his brother RV Ashok Kumar walked into the Madras High Court and walked out with anticipatory bail. The prosecution spoke of hawala trails, a fleeing accused, deleted footage. The High Court, weighing submissions from a Senior Advocate, granted relief with light conditions - appear twice daily, cooperate with the investigation. No handcuffs, no lock-up, no waiting.

Compare this with the undertrial in a district sub-jail, arrested for stealing a mobile phone worth ₹8,000, who has spent four months in custody because he cannot furnish a surety, cannot afford counsel beyond the harried legal-aid lawyer appearing in 50 matters a day and whose bail plea is number 47 on a crowded list. Justice VR Krishna Iyer wrote, in State of Rajasthan v. Balchand (1977), that “bail is the rule and jail is the exception.” Half a century later, the rule serves the man with a Senior Advocate on retainer; the exception swallows the man without one.

Senthil Balaji’s case is not an aberration; it is a data point in a pattern. Ministers accused of corruption, disproportionate assets and worse have repeatedly found the Supreme Court and the High Courts remarkably accommodating with interim protection - stay of arrest, anticipatory bail, transfer of investigation - often before the ink on the FIR has dried. Contrast this with undertrials, who by the National Crime Records Bureau’s own reckoning constitute more than three-fourths of India’s prison population - the overwhelming majority poor, unlettered and unrepresented by counsel who can walk into a judge’s chamber on the strength of a name.

This is not a peculiarly Indian embarrassment. Sir James Mathew’s Victorian-era witticism - that in England, justice is open to all, “like the Ritz Hotel” - travels well across oceans and centuries. Western democracies boast the same architecture of equality before the law and the same practical inequality in who can afford to walk through its doors. What has changed is not the phenomenon but its visibility. Print, television and now the relentless churn of social media place every order, every observation from the Bench, every appearance of a Senior Advocate for a powerful client, before a public that once had no means of comparing the fortunes of the minister’s brother with those of the daily-wage labourer in the next courtroom.

Let there be no illusion about what is being said here. The rule of law remains supreme and personal liberty under Article 21 is, rightly, treated as precious by our courts. The exercise of that liberty - the swift filing of a writ, the calm and confident argument before the Bench, the readiness of a Senior Counsel to drop other briefs and appear at short notice - is itself a resource unequally distributed. It is not that the judiciary sets out to protect the powerful and abandon the poor. It is that the architecture of access - the fee a Senior Advocate commands, the speed with which a matter can be mentioned and listed, the polish of a well-drafted petition - favours those already privileged before a single word is spoken in court. The umbrella opens easily for those who know how to hold it out.

Having begun at the Bar, moved to the Bench and now returned to practice as a Senior Advocate designated by the Supreme Court, I have had the unusual privilege of viewing this question from every vantage a lawyer in this country can occupy. Each seat teaches something the others cannot. The Bar - the desperation of a client awaiting relief; the Bench - the weight of deciding whose liberty matters today, the return to practice how differently the same court can respond depending on who stands before it. That range of exposure sharpens the disquiet rather than dulling it; it is this vantage, not indignation alone, that I hope lends the present view its balance. Every interim order granted overnight to a minister facing serious allegations, set against the routine remand of an ordinary citizen for a fraction of the alleged wrongdoing, chips away a little more at the public’s faith that the law is, in fact, no respecter of persons.

The remedy does not lie in denying bail to the powerful; that would only replace one injustice with another. It lies in extending, with equal energy, the same solicitude to the ordinary undertrial: faster listing of bail applications from prisons, genuinely resourced legal aid and a Bench willing to ask, of the poor as readily as of the privileged, why liberty should wait. Until that day arrives, “equality before the law” will remain, for a great many Indians, an aspiration recited in judgments rather than a fact lived in courtrooms.

Justice V Parthiban is a retired judge of the Madras High Court.