Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das, Ashutosh Ranka Get Bail With 1-Year Maintain Peace Clause: Is CJP Protest Movement At Risk?

After a day-long detention and preventive arrest, the Executive Magistrate ordered the release of CJP founder Abhijit Dipke, Ashutosh Ranka and Saurav Das on conditional bail with a surety bond of Rs 50,000 each. The conditional bail binds them to maintain peace, law and order for one year.

The three were detained from inside their Air India flight after they landed in Delhi to stage a mass protest at Jantar Mantar, demanding resignation of CEC Gyanesh Kumar and criminal proceedings against him over the alleged irregularities in the electoral process.

The bail order has put the onus on the CJP leadership to be extra careful with their future protests and demonstrations. After release on bail, Dipke called Prime Minister Narendra Modi an embarrassment as PM.

"Modi, as PM, is an embarrassment to India. Never has this country seen a bigger coward and bully," he said in an X post after getting released.

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What’s next for CJP?

The CJP has pledged to continue the protests against Gyanesh Kumar. In his X post after release, Ashutosh Ranka has vowed to continue protests, saying, "Gyanesh Kumar is a traitor. He will have to resign. I am even willing to spend my entire life in jail to get such traitors removed."

"It’s Narendra Modi who has breached the peace of our beloved nation," Ranka lashed at PM Modi in a separate post. However, the mass-scale protests or marches into the security corridors would not be easy after the conditional bail.

The induction of an Executive Magistrate means that the Delhi Police have invoked Section 126 of the BNSS. The section empowers the EM to initiate prevention proceedings against them if it considers them likely to breach the peace or disturb public tranquillity.

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Simply, the police could now take preventive action against them without waiting for violence or a disturbance to occur. Unlike preventive arrest, the peace bond has created a formal, time-limited legal obligation to keep the peace.

If a breach is found, they can be arrested on the orders of the Executive Magistrate and may even be imprisoned for the rest of the surety bond time.