Chandigarh: Journalist Bhawana Kishore, who was taken into custody by Punjab police on Friday was granted interim bail late Saturday night by the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
The order of Justice Augustine George Masih came in this regard after the special evening hearing while the case would remain in operation till Monday.
Objections raised by the Advocate General will be considered on the next date of hearing when the reply to the petition and records of the case are available with him, the order said and added that the case would be taken up for consideration on May 8.
The petitioner Bhawana Kishore D/o Raj Kishore Gupta is ordered to be released on interim bail subject to the satisfaction of the CJM/Duty Magistrate, Ludhiana till the next date of hearing, May 8, the order said.
It may recalled that Bhawana and two others had moved the High Court for quashing the police case registered against her under the provisions of SC/ST (prevention of atrocities) Act and the provisions of the IPC after claiming that the said case was nothing but political witch-hunt of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government.
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She along with her others were detained for hours on Friday by police in Ludhiana on the charges of hitting a woman by the car she was travelling in and using derogatory words against the complainant.
Appearing on the behalf of the petitioner, senior advocates R S Rai and Chetan Mittal held that the news channel Bhawana was working for, had been reporting against Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and that as a "counter blast", the said case had been registered.
'Petitioners not known to the complainant'
Stating that the said allegations indicated that the petitioners were not known to the complainant nor is there any assertion in the FIR that they had ever met earlier, the HC order held that hence using derogatory words, as had been mentioned in the FIR did not arise.
The court held that the senior counsel asserted that he was only insisting upon grant of interim bail to petitioner Bhawana being a lady of 31 years of age and the senior correspondent, who had along with the other two petitioners gone to Ludhiana to attend an event relating to the inauguration of government run clinics on May 5, was performing her duty.
The court also held that advocate general, Punjab, had stated that he had not received the records of the case and, therefore, was unable to make submissions to court in detail. He asserted that the FIR was not encyclopedia and, therefore, without the records he was unable to further assist the court.
