The Gujarat High Court has issued notice on journalist Ravi Nair’s challenge after he was taken into custody following the rejection of his application seeking cancellation of a non-bailable warrant.
Ahmedabad: The Gujarat High Court has issued notice in a petition filed by journalist Ravi Nair, who was taken into custody after a Gandhinagar appellate court rejected his request to cancel a non-bailable warrant issued against him.
The September 19 order of Justice M K Thakker records a specific sequence that has now become central to Nair’s challenge.
According to submissions made on his behalf before the High Court, a non-bailable warrant was issued directly against him without any prior notice or summons. When Nair later approached the appellate court seeking cancellation of that warrant through an application filed below Exhibit 18, the application was rejected and he was taken into custody.
The High Court has not made a finding on whether those submissions are correct. At this stage, it has issued notice to the State and listed the matter for further hearing.
What led to Ravi Nair’s custody?
The immediate trigger was Nair’s absence from a hearing on September 3.
Nair had sought exemption from personal appearance for that hearing. His request was rejected, following which the Gandhinagar court issued a non-bailable warrant against him.
His petition says this was the first occasion on which an application seeking exemption from personal appearance had been declined. It also argues that the court moved directly to a non-bailable warrant without first issuing a notice, summons or bailable warrant.
The Gujarat High Court’s order separately records Nair’s counsel as submitting that the non-bailable warrant was issued “without issuing any notice or summons.”
The warrant was returnable on September 17.
Nair appeared before the appellate court on that date and sought cancellation of the warrant. The High Court order identifies this as an application filed below Exhibit 18.
That application was rejected.
The order then records that Nair was taken into custody.
Why was he sent to jail?
Nair was not sent to jail because of an order passed by the Gujarat High Court. His custody followed the appellate court’s refusal to cancel the non-bailable warrant when he appeared before it on September 17.
His petition further states that he was sent to judicial custody even though, according to him, no application had been filed by any party seeking cancellation of the bail previously granted to him and no notice on such cancellation had been issued.
Nair also sought suspension of the order so that he could approach the High Court. According to the petition, that request was declined and he was sent to jail the same day.
Those claims remain part of his challenge and have not yet been finally adjudicated by the High Court.
Conviction and one-year sentence form the wider background
The custody proceedings are connected to Nair’s appeal against his conviction in a criminal defamation case involving social media posts concerning the Adani Group.
He was convicted of criminal defamation and sentenced to one year of simple imprisonment. His appeal challenges both the conviction and the sentence.
Nair has said that he had been regularly attending hearings before missing the September 3 date.
The dispute before the High Court now centres not only on the existence of the non-bailable warrant, but on the manner in which it was issued and what followed when Nair appeared before the appellate court seeking its cancellation.
High Court takes up matter on working Saturday
Justice M K Thakker heard the matter on September 19.
The order records that, considering the urgency involved and pursuant to an order passed by the Chief Justice, the matter was circulated on a working Saturday.
After hearing Nair’s counsel, the High Court issued notice and made it returnable on September 21. The Additional Public Prosecutor waived service of notice on behalf of the State. Direct service was also permitted on the same day.
For now, the High Court has only opened the door for examination of Nair’s challenge. It has not yet held that the non-bailable warrant was improperly issued or that his custody was unlawful.
That question remains to be considered in the proceedings ahead.
Nair is also facing other criminal cases filed by Adani Group subsidiary companies. In one such case, the Ahmedabad Detection of Crime Branch recently searched his houses in Delhi and seized laptops and phones.
Also Read: Warren Buffett’s Warning to Investors: The Costly Mistake to Avoid When Stock Prices Fall
