Granting of bail en masse in dowry death cases by an Allahabad HC judge is troubling

In February, while overturning a bail order to the accused by the Allahabad High Court in a dowry-death case, the Supreme Court had flagged its glaring inadequacy, citing the order by the single-judge bench of Justice Pankaj Bhatia as “most shocking and disappointing”. Now, an investigation by this newspaper has revealed that in three months, in 508 of 510 publicly available orders in dowry death cases passed by Justice Bhatia, bail was routinely granted, using similar logic, language and bond amounts. The near-uniformity signals a troubling lack of application of mind by the court and a dilution of due process: In cases as intimate and often difficult to prove as dowry violence, reducing judicial scrutiny to a template risks turning adjudication into a mechanical exercise, divorced from the specific facts of each case.

Bail jurisprudence, anchored in the maxim “bail, not jail”, demands a careful assessment of the severity of allegations. Especially in the case of dowry violence and death, Section 304B of the IPC (or Section 80 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita) creates a statutory presumption against the accused, treating the crime as heinous. Dowry-related violence tends to occur behind closed doors where evidence is sparse and witnesses vulnerable. But when judicial scrutiny seems to be brought to bear on these cases by rote, it threatens to leave women disproportionately exposed to systemic injustice. The Supreme Court has repeatedly stressed that high courts exercising powers under Section 439 CrPC (now Section 483 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023) must engage in reasoned prima facie assessments that reflect in the structure and language of orders.

In critical rulings such as State of Punjab v. Iqbal Singh (1991) and Shanti v. State of Haryana (1990), the apex court has expanded the understanding of dowry-related violence and strengthened the legal framework to meet its challenges. In the landmark State of Uttar Pradesh v. Ajmal Beg Etc (2025), the SC reiterated that dowry-related violence goes against constitutional guarantees of Articles 14, 15 and 21, and that its eradication is a “constitutional and social necessity”. These are crucial lessons to remember. If the adjudication of such crimes slips into mechanical repetition, it is not just legal standards that are eroded, but the promise of justice as well.