Bail as punishment: How Odisha’s courts turned justice into caste-based coercion
By Tapesh Raghav, Independent Litigation Advocate
Every morning at six, a 26-year-old Dalit grocery shop owner from Odisha’s Rayagada district would wake up, travel twenty kilometres, and sweep the floors of Kashipur Police Station. He had not been convicted of any crime. He had protested against a mining company’s project in the Tijimali hills. He was simply out on bail and the court that granted him that bail also handed him a mop.
Between May 2025 and January 2026, at least eight accused persons in Odisha were released on bail with the condition that they clean police stations. Six belonged to Dalit communities. Two were Adivasi. All were protesters opposing a local mining project. Last week, an investigation by Article 14 brought these orders to public attention. On May 4, the Supreme Court took suo motu cognisance of the matter. A bench of Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi will now examine what went wrong. The court is right to be alarmed. But the question worth asking is not just legal. It is also deeply unsettling: how do several judges, sitting in different courts, arrive at the same unusual, constitutionally indefensible order?
Bail conditions exist for one reason alone, to ensure the accused appears in court. Compelled labour has no legal basis, no rational connection to trial attendance, and no sanction in either the old Code of Criminal Procedure or the new Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita. These orders violate Article 21 (right to life and personal liberty) and Article 23 (prohibition of forced labour). Cleaning floors at dawn serves no judicial purpose. It serves only humiliation.
But to call these orders merely illegal is to miss the larger and more troubling picture. The conditions were not random. They required Dalit and Adivasi individuals, communities that Indian feudalism has for centuries designated as those who clean, sweep, and serve, to perform exactly that labour for a state institution. India’s caste system was never merely social prejudice. It was a feudal economic arrangement in which labour was allocated by birth, enforced by sanction, and maintained by the threat of exclusion and violence. When a judge orders a Dalit protester to clean a police station, he is acting out a feudal reflex, the instinct that certain bodies belong in certain roles, that dissent from the lower orders demands not just legal response but social correction.
Yet what strains rational explanation is the pattern itself. One judge passing such an order could, charitably, be explained as individual prejudice or ignorance. But eight orders, across one High Court judge and two district court judges, targeting the same protest movement, imposing the same specific condition, over eight months, this demands a harder question. Judicial decisions are supposed to emerge from independent application of law to facts. When multiple judicial officers converge on an identical, legally baseless, and caste-inflected punishment directed at one specific group of protesters, the possibility of independent judicial thinking wears very thin.
One must ask whether there exists an external actor, whether corporate, political, or administrative, that has sought to influence these judicial officers, directly or indirectly, toward a common outcome. The uniformity of these orders is not the fingerprint of judicial independence. It bears the look of coordination.
The protests in Rayagada district are a democratic assertion of rights recognised under the Forest Rights Act and the Constitution’s Fifth Schedule. Over forty people have been arrested. This is how feudal power entrenches itself in a constitutional democracy, not through open repression but by weaponising the legal process. Arrest, prolonged custody, and bail conditions designed to exhaust and humiliate: each step is formally legal yet designed to make dissent too costly to sustain.
The Supreme, in the best interest of law, should order a formal inquiry, not merely into the legality of these orders but into whether any external influence was brought to bear upon the judges who passed them. Judicial independence is the most sacred pillar of democracy, but that sanctity cuts both ways. It must be protected from interference, and it must be enforced as a duty. A judge who has been influenced, or a judge who independently chose to weaponise caste, has in either case abused judicial power. The Supreme Court must say so plainly, and accountability must follow without exception.
India is not post-caste. It is not post-feudal. The Odisha bail orders are a reminder that the distance between a constitutional text and constitutional reality is measured in the suffering of those the text was written to protect. Justice, in this country, still has unfinished business, and it must begin with its own house.
(Tapesh Raghav is an Independent Litigation Advocate before the Delhi High Court with expertise in civil, commercial, banking, and cyber law disputes. A recognised cyber policy expert, he advises clients on technology regulations, data governance, digital compliance, and emerging cyber risks, integrating legal strategy with evolving digital frameworks. Views expressed in this article are personal)
