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On Wednesday (March 25), a bench of Justices J.B. Pardiwala and Vijay Bishnoi of the Supreme Court cancelled the bail granted by the Patna high court to a man accused of his wife’s dowry death. The order in Lal Muni Devi v. State of Bihar (Criminal Appeal No. 1626/2026) invoked the gravity of dowry death as a social evil, criticised the high court for a “mechanical approach,” and directed that a copy be forwarded to the chief justice of the Patna high court.

Coming weeks after Justice Pardiwala’s intervention in Chetram Verma v. State of U.P., which prompted Justice Pankaj Bhatia of the Allahabad high court to seek removal from the bail roster citing a “huge demoralising and chilling effect,” this order deepens the concern that the Supreme Court is carving out a class of offences where the constitutional norm of bail stands functionally reversed.

A woman was found dead at her matrimonial home in Patna in September 2024, roughly a year and a half after her marriage. Her mother lodged an FIR alleging dowry harassment and murder.

The husband was arrested and charged under Sections 103(1) (murder) and 80 (dowry death) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023. The post-mortem report recorded grave injuries: a skull fracture with lacerated brain matter, a ruptured sternum and heart, and a fractured pelvis. The cause of death was haemorrhage and shock due to head injury. The defence contended that the deceased, said to have been in an unstable state of mind, had jumped from the sixth floor of a building.

Both the sessions court and the high court initially declined bail. A second application was filed in late 2025, by which time the accused had been in custody for over 16 months. The high court called for a report from the trial court, noted that charge had been framed, that only one of eight witnesses had been examined, and that the trial was unlikely to conclude in the near future. It released the accused on conditions including cooperation with the trial and liability for cancellation in the event of witness tampering.

Rhetoric over reasoning

The Supreme Court held the order “wholly unsustainable,” faulting the high court for not discussing “anything”. But the impugned order, as reproduced by the Supreme Court itself at paragraph nine, tells a different story. It engaged with the stage of proceedings, the number of witnesses, the period of custody, and imposed conditions to protect the integrity of the trial. The order was compact but addressed the considerations that bail law requires.

The Supreme Court’s own reasoning is thin on principle and heavy on rhetoric. Its central paragraph characterises dowry deaths as “a profound disgrace and a major social evil” – a proposition no one disputes, but one that does no analytical work in determining whether this accused’s continued incarceration, pending an incomplete trial, is legally justified.

The court reproduced at length its earlier observations in Shabeen Ahmad v. State of Uttar Pradesh (2025), decided by a different bench (Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta), about the “social message emanating from judicial orders”. This passage, already cited in Chetram Verma, now operates as a free-standing principle that makes the nature of the offence dispositive, rather than one factor among several.

The post-mortem injuries in this case are undeniably severe, and a court cancelling bail is entitled to weigh them. But the Supreme Court’s order does not undertake the case-specific inquiry that bail law demands. It does not explain why the conditions imposed by the high court were inadequate, why 16 months of custody were insufficient, or what supervening circumstances warranted cancellation beyond the gravity of the charge itself.

The court’s own cited precedent, Ajwar v. Waseem (2024), lists several factors relevant to bail: the nature of the accusations, the manner of the crime, criminal antecedents, and the likelihood of tampering or absconding. The high court considered several of these. The Supreme Court, by elevating the gravity of the offence above all else, collapses the multi-factor test into a single criterion.

“On this ground alone”

The most remarkable passage is paragraph 18:

“We are informed that the trial is in progress. On this ground alone, the high court should have declined bail.” If the mere fact that a trial is underway suffices to deny bail, no undertrial accused in any pending case could ever be released. This proposition stands in direct tension with the Supreme Court’s own landmark pronouncement in Satender Kumar Antil v. CBI (2022), that “bail is the rule, jail is an exception” and that the object of bail “is neither punitive nor preventative.”

“We are informed that the trial is in progress. On this ground alone, the high court should have declined bail.” If the mere fact that a trial is underway suffices to deny bail, no undertrial accused in any pending case could ever be released. This proposition stands in direct tension with the Supreme Court’s own landmark pronouncement in Satender Kumar Antil v. CBI (2022), that “bail is the rule, jail is an exception” and that the object of bail “is neither punitive nor preventative.”

A statutory error and a conceptual conflation

The order contains what appears to be a typographical error. In paragraph 13, the court faults the high court for ignoring “the presumption of commission of offence as provided under Section 114 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam, 2023.” But Section 114 of the BSA deals with proof of good faith in fiduciary transactions, not dowry death. The relevant presumption is in Section 118 of the BSA (corresponding to the former Section 113B of the Indian Evidence Act, 1872). 

Even assuming the court meant Section 118, invoking this presumption at the bail stage raises a distinct conceptual difficulty. Section 118 is a trial-stage evidentiary rule: it operates after the prosecution has established that the woman was subjected to cruelty or harassment in connection with dowry “soon before her death.”

At the bail stage, the court makes a prima facie assessment of whether liberty should be curtailed, not a determination of guilt. To treat a presumption designed for the trial as a ground for refusing bail is to treat the accused as presumptively guilty before the trial has meaningfully begun.

As Balaji Srinivasan argued in a column in The Indian Express on March 26, Section 80 of the BNS does not create a reverse presumption comparable to Section 29 of the POCSO Act, which expressly shifts the burden of proof. The presumption of innocence remains the default; nothing in the BNS displaces it at the bail stage.

The institutional chill

In Chetram Verma, decided on February 9, Justice Pardiwala (then sitting with Justice K.V. Viswanathan) described Justice Bhatia’s bail order as “one of the most shocking and disappointing orders” and directed a copy to be placed before the chief justice of the Allahabad high court. Justice Bhatia responded by seeking permanent removal from the bail roster. The Oudh Bar Association wrote to the chief justice of India expressing concern. Now, in Lal Muni Devi, an identical direction is issued to the Patna high court. The signal to high court judges is unmistakable: granting bail in a dowry death case invites institutional censure.

The consequences are foreseeable.

High court judges handling hundreds of bail applications weekly, in courts with significant vacancies (the Allahabad high court alone, with over 12 lakh pending cases, had 51 vacancies against a sanctioned strength of 160 as of March 2026), will err on the side of refusal. The result will be longer undertrial incarceration for persons not yet convicted, directly undermining the guarantee of personal liberty under Article 21.

The irony is pointed. The Supreme Court is currently supervising, through In Re: Policy Strategy for Grant of Bail (Suo Motu W.P. (Crl.) No. 4 of 2021), a nationwide effort to address the crisis of undertrial incarceration, a crucial facet of which is the grant of bail where trials are unlikely to conclude soon. To simultaneously demand that high courts refuse bail in dowry death cases precisely because trials are slow is to work at cross-purposes with its own reform agenda.

Correction, not intimidation

The remedy for a poorly reasoned bail order is to set it aside and remand for fresh consideration, not to deliver moral homilies, direct copies to chief justices, and lay down propositions that reverse the bail norm for an entire class of offences. In Lal Muni Devi, the high court engaged with the established parameters: the nature of the offence, the period of custody, the stage of trial, and the conditions needed to secure attendance and prevent tampering.

Its order was not “wholly unsustainable”; it was a defensible exercise of discretion where the accused had spent over 16 months in custody with no early conclusion in sight. For the Supreme Court to treat this as an occasion for institutional correction directed at the chief justice of the Patna high court is to signal that in dowry death cases, the carefully calibrated bail inquiry gives way to a single, overriding consideration: the social gravity of the charge. That is not bail jurisprudence. It is its negation.

© The Wire