I have been practising at the Lucknow Bench for over a decade. I have stood outside courtrooms waiting for my matter to be called while a judge ahead of me disposes of forty, fifty, sometimes sixty bail matters before noon. I have watched colleagues — good, careful lawyers — spend three minutes on their feet before a judge who has already read the paper book, already formed a prima facie view, and is already reaching for the next file. This is not negligence. This is the Allahabad High Court on an ordinary working day.
I say this because when I read the recent report by a prominent national daily claiming that Justice Pankaj Bhatia granted bail in 508 out of 510 dowry death cases in three months, my first reaction was not outrage. It was recognition. Recognition of a working reality that the reporter who wrote that piece has clearly never experienced, never bothered to understand, and apparently never thought worth mentioning.
The Number That Proves Nothing
Let me start with the statistic itself, since the entire report is built around it.
508 out of 510. 99.61%. The headline presents this as self-evidently damning. But damning compared to what? The report does not tell us what the bail grant rate in Section 304B matters is across other judges of the Allahabad High Court. It does not tell us what the national average is at the High Court appellate stage. It does not explain — even in passing — that by the time an accused reaches the High Court with a bail application, he has already been refused bail by the Sessions Court. The High Court is not reviewing the Sessions Court’s decision. It is hearing a fresh application, on fresh grounds, with a fresh judicial mind.
A bail grant rate of 99% at the High Court stage might be high. It might also be perfectly consistent with the profile of cases that reach that stage — applications from accused persons who have spent eight, ten, twelve months in custody on charges that may, at trial, result in acquittal. We simply do not know, because the report never asks the question.
What the report does instead is present a raw number to a general audience that has no framework to evaluate it, in the confident expectation that 99.61% will feel wrong. That is not journalism. That is manipulation.
What the Report Chose Not to Tell You
Here is something buried in the report’s own data, mentioned almost as an afterthought: Justice Bhatia denied bail in two cases. In one, the victim’s body was nearly ninety percent burned and she had herself named the accused to her father before dying. In the other, the husband was accused of shooting his wife.
Think about what this actually means. A judge supposedly operating on autopilot — rubber-stamping bail applications without reading them — denied bail in precisely the two cases where the facts screamed for denial. He read those files. He distinguished them from the rest. He made a judgment call that any reasonable court would have made.
The report mentions these two cases and then moves on, apparently unbothered by the contradiction they create for its own thesis. I am not unbothered. If you are going to accuse a judge of mechanical, unthinking adjudication, you do not get to quietly acknowledge that his two refusals were legally and factually correct and then continue with your argument as though nothing happened.
On “Identical Orders” — A Word From Someone Who Has Drafted Them
The report makes much of the fact that the bail orders followed a “near-identical structure” with “uniform bail conditions and bond amounts.” This is presented as damning. To any practising advocate, it is utterly unremarkable.
Every bail order in every High Court in India contains the same standard conditions. Appear before the trial court on every date. Do not tamper with witnesses. Do not leave the jurisdiction without prior permission. Furnish a personal bond of Rs. 20,000 with two sureties. These are not conditions invented by Justice Bhatia. They flow from decades of Supreme Court jurisprudence on bail conditions — from Sanjay Chandra to Arnesh Kumar to Satender Kumar Antil. A judge who imposed wildly varying bond amounts and idiosyncratic conditions in each case would actually be the concerning one.
The uniformity of the operative portion of a bail order has never, in the history of Indian legal journalism, been treated as evidence of judicial delinquency — until now, apparently, when there is a narrative to sustain.
One Order Was Set Aside. Not Five Hundred and Eight.
This needs to be said plainly, because the report’s entire framing depends on the reader not pausing to think about it.
The Supreme Court examined one bail order. The order dated October 10, 2025, in the matter of Devraj alias Golu. In that order, the bench of Justices Pardiwala and Viswanathan found that the High Court had not engaged with the statutory presumption under Section 118 of the Bharatiya Sakshya Adhiniyam — the presumption that arises where a woman dies in suspicious circumstances after being subjected to cruelty for dowry. The Supreme Court set aside that order and asked the accused to surrender.
That is it. That is the totality of what the Supreme Court actually decided. It did not examine the other 508 orders. It did not find them defective. It could not have, because they were not before it. The report takes this single judicial intervention and uses it as a lens through which to retrospectively condemn an entire body of judicial work that the Supreme Court never saw and never commented on.
This is the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc — because one order was bad, all 508 must be bad. It would not pass muster in a first-year law tutorial. It should not pass muster in a national newspaper either.
The 304B Accused Is Also a Human Being
I want to say something that I suspect will be unpopular, but which any honest criminal lawyer knows to be true.
The accused in a dowry death case is not automatically guilty. Section 304B carries a statutory presumption — but it is a rebuttable presumption, operative at the trial stage, after evidence is led, witnesses are examined, and the defence is heard. At the bail stage, the court is not deciding guilt. It is deciding whether the continued deprivation of liberty pending trial is justified given the totality of circumstances.
The report, by repeatedly invoking “dowry death” and framing every bail grant as a failure of justice for women, collapses this distinction entirely. It implies that granting bail in a 304B case is itself a moral wrong — a concession to the accused at the expense of the victim’s family. This is a deeply flawed understanding of how criminal law works and what bail jurisdiction is for.
The Real Story Nobody Wrote
If a reporter had actually wanted to investigate institutional failure in bail jurisdiction at the Allahabad High Court, here is the story that was sitting right in front of them, unwritten.
One judge. Five hundred and ten bail applications. Three months. That is approximately 170 bail applications per month, or roughly eight to ten per working day, in one category of cases alone, alongside everything else on the judge’s docket. The Allahabad High Court currently functions with a significant vacancy against its sanctioned strength, split across two benches at Lucknow and Prayagraj, with a pendency running into millions of cases. The Oudh Bar Association, in its letter to the Chief Justice of India, described judges as working “upto the hilt” under “ever-increasing pressure of mounting work load.”
The real scandal is not that Justice Bhatia granted bail in 508 cases. The real scandal is that the State has so catastrophically failed to appoint sufficient judges that a single judge is being asked to carry this load at all. The real scandal is a system that generates 510 Section 304B bail applications in a quarter — which means 510 families torn apart by allegations of dowry death, 510 accused persons in custody, 510 trials somewhere in the pipeline — and the institutional response is to assign all of it to one courtroom.
That is the story. It requires no villain. It requires only the courage to point at the State rather than at a judge.
What the Supreme Court Did, and What the Newspaper Did
There is an important distinction that the report’s framing deliberately obscures. When the Supreme Court criticised Justice Bhatia’s order, it did so in the exercise of its appellate jurisdiction, in a judicial proceeding, on the record, with reasons. The affected party — the complainant’s father — had approached the court, was heard, and received a remedy. The Supreme Court corrected an error. That is precisely what the appellate hierarchy exists to do.
When the newspaper published its report, it did so in the exercise of no jurisdiction whatsoever. There was no hearing. Justice Bhatia was not given an opportunity to respond. His 508 orders were not read and analysed for legal correctness — they were counted. And the resulting “finding” was published to a mass audience with a headline designed to generate maximum outrage.
The Supreme Court’s criticism — however sharp — was an institutional correction within a system that has rules, procedures, and remedies. The newspaper’s report was a public flogging. These are not the same thing, and conflating them as equivalent forms of “accountability” does a disservice to both.
The press must watch the judiciary. I believe that without qualification. But watching the judiciary means reading judgments, understanding jurisdiction, contextualising data, and asking uncomfortable questions of the system — not just of the individual judge who happens to be most visible in a given news cycle. It means having the patience to understand that a High Court bail order is not a tweet, and that 508 orders cannot be evaluated by counting them.
What was published recently was not that kind of watchdog journalism. It was a number, a headline, and an implication — served up to readers who had no way to know what was missing. Justice Bhatia deserved better. So did they.
The author is an advocate practising before the Allahabad High Court, Lucknow Bench.
