I’m scared you won’t get justice if tomorrow you find yourself standing in a court of law. Scared because the court now, it seems, isn’t interested in weighing why something happened. My worry stems from the case against senior journalist and author Ajeet Bharti under the SC/ST Act, filed by Balakram Bauddh, Delhi State President of the Azad Samaj Party (Kanshi Ram), over remarks Bharti made during a YouTube live stream.
During the stream, Gulvinder Singh wrote: “Ajeet Bharti, get your sister married to MP Chandrashekhar, and reservation will come to an end.” To this, Bharti obviously got angry and said: “Singh ji, if you have got your sister or mother married to a Dom or a Chamar, that’s fine. However, my sister is quite comfortable in life… Further, just because Chandrashekhar is a Chamar and an MP, he doesn’t become a good fit for marriage…”
The exchange didn’t end there. It got uglier, and Bharti’s anger spilled onto Chandrashekhar’s face and back onto Singh’s own sister and mother, the same coin Singh had started paying in. That is what rage sounds like when someone has just put your sister on a live chat as a bargaining chip. And that rage, where it came from, is exactly what the court refused to look at.
The clip went viral. Bauddh complained, and an FIR was registered at North Avenue police station under the SC/ST Act, the IT Act and the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita. Bharti sought anticipatory bail. The Patiala House Court refused it on September 7. He went to the Delhi High Court. On September 24, the High Court refused it too.
Justice Saurabh Banerjee held that offences under Sections 3(1)(r) and 3(1)(s) of the Act were prima facie made out, which meant the Act’s bar on anticipatory bail applied, and dismissed Bharti’s plea as not maintainable. What unfolded in that courtroom must worry us all, not because of what the SC/ST Act says, but because of what it shows about how our higher courts have come to look at an offence.
Bharti’s advocate asked the court to hear the whole exchange, not just a few lines: the comment about his sister that set him off in the first place. During the hearing, the court said it was not concerned with the statements that had allegedly provoked Bharti. When the order came, it held that Bharti had invoked caste superiority with the aim of humiliating Chandrashekhar, and that the provocation “cannot act as a shield” because he knew what he was saying. The court also said the provocation came from Singh, not from Chandrashekhar. But it was Singh who made Chandrashekhar the subject. He named him and offered him Bharti’s sister. Bharti answered the proposal he was handed.
But read Section 3(1)(r) again. It doesn’t punish ugly words. It punishes someone who intentionally insults a member of a Scheduled Caste or Tribe with intent to humiliate.
And you cannot know intent without asking why.
Was Bharti setting out to humiliate a man for his caste, or spitting rage at a stranger who had just offered up his sister as the price of ending reservation, and dragging the MP in because Singh had put him there? That is a question of why, and it is a question for a trial. Instead, it was settled at the bail stage, on a first reading, with the provocation set aside as no shield at all. And once that happens, the Act’s bar kicks in, and a man faces arrest before any court has properly weighed the one question on which his case turns. The order leaned hardest on one line, that Chandrashekhar would have to make himself “worthy enough” to seek a savarna daughter’s hand. Whether that was caste contempt, or a man hurling back the very marriage Singh had just proposed, is precisely what a trial exists to decide. It was decided at bail.
But then, what about Nupur Sharma? Many of us remember that she went to the Supreme Court with one simple request: club the multiple FIRs filed against her across the country over her remarks on the Prophet and transfer them to Delhi. That was all. Neither the Udaipur killing nor the merits of her remarks were before the court. Yet the bench of Justices Surya Kant and JB Pardiwala went out of its way to say that her “loose tongue” had set the entire country on fire, that she was single-handedly responsible for what was happening in the country, that her outburst was responsible for the beheading of the tailor Kanhaiya Lal in Udaipur, and that she should have gone on air and apologised to the whole nation. It wasn’t at all required. Not one of these remarks made it into the written order, which simply recorded that she had withdrawn her petition. They didn’t need to. Every news channel had already run them.
And in all of that, the court never once asked her why she said what she said, in what debate, or in response to what. It didn’t need to ask; it had already decided. Her remarks, the bench said, were made for cheap publicity, a political agenda or some other nefarious purpose. There was no hearing on that and no evidence, in a hearing that was only about clubbing FIRs. Her why wasn’t ignored. It was written for her. Nor did the court dwell on why a tailor was killed, and by whom. The killers’ why was quietly replaced by her what. Barely six weeks later, the same bench clubbed the FIRs and transferred them to Delhi, the very relief it had mocked her for seeking.
Or take Syed Waseem Rizvi (now Jitendra Narayan Singh Tyagi), former chairman of the Uttar Pradesh Shia Waqf Board. Five years ago, he approached the same apex court challenging 26 verses of the Quran, arguing that they were being used by terror groups to justify attacks on non-believers. When the matter came up, his counsel even narrowed the plea to asking only that the teaching of these verses in government-run madrasas be regulated, so children were not indoctrinated. The bench, led by Justice RF Nariman, asked whether he was seriously pressing the petition, called it “absolutely frivolous,” dismissed it after a brief hearing and slapped a fine of Rs 50,000 on him. The court didn’t have to agree with him. But it owed him an answer to his reasons: to the verses he cited, to the terror groups he named, to the children he worried about. It gave him one word and a bill. Meanwhile, a former president of the Moradabad Bar Association had announced a reward of Rs 11 lakh for his beheading. And when he later left Islam, he walked into the one punishment classical Islamic law reserves for apostasy, my dear friends: death, nothing else. That is the man the court would not so much as hear, a former chief of a Waqf Board who risked his life to highlight verses he believed are not humane to the infidels.
So there it is.
Bharti’s why was set aside. Sharma’s was written for her. Rizvi’s was never heard.
And let me tell you what the court couldn’t: what Sharma and Rizvi said or stood by was rooted in fact, not some made-up claim.
The same approach in Bharti’s case, as I see it, tells us this: “When someone drags your mother or sister into the mud, your anger will be judged on its own, as if it came from nowhere.”
Knowing why an act happened forms the very base on which the law rests, as only context helps us understand the circumstances of an offence. The Supreme Court itself said so, not long ago. In 2024, granting anticipatory bail to YouTuber Shajan Skaria in an SC/ST Act case filed by an MLA, it held that it isn’t enough that the man insulted belongs to a Scheduled Caste; the humiliation must be because of his caste. And it held that the Act’s bar on bail is no bar where the complaint doesn’t make out a case. One of the judges on that bench was Justice JB Pardiwala. So the law already asks why. It is our courts that keep forgetting to.
That the court no longer cares why something happened is a new low for our judiciary.
