The Supreme Court on Tuesday, 3 March, dismissed an appeal challenging the Allahabad High Court order granting bail to former Union minister Swami Chinmayanand in a sexual exploitation case lodged by a law student.
A bench of Justices Ashok Bhushan and Naveen Sinha rejected the plea saying that the Allahabad High Court has given reasons in its order granting bail to Chinmayanand and it requires no interference.
However, the bench issued notice to the Uttar Pradesh government and others on a separate plea seeking transfer of the case against Chinmayanad to a court in Delhi.
The high court had on 3 February granted bail to Chinmayanad who was arrested in a case of sexual exploitation of a woman studying law at a college run by his trust at Shahjahanpur in Uttar Pradesh.
"Both parties crossed their limits and at this stage, it is very difficult to adjudicate as to who exploited whom. In fact, both of them used each other," the high court had observed while granting bail to Chinmayanand.
Chinmayanand, whose trust runs the Shahjahanpur law college where the woman studied, was arrested on 20 September last year under section 376-C of the IPC, a charge short of rape.
The section is applied when someone in authority takes advantage of his official position to "induce or seduce" a woman to have sex with him.
In a parallel case, the woman was charged with allegedly trying to extort money from Chinmayanand.
The high court had granted her bail on 4 December last year.
The Supreme Court had stepped in after the 23-year-old law student went missing for a few days in August last year after posting a video clip on social media, alleging sexual abuse.
A special investigation team of Uttar Pradesh Police, formed on the directions of the apex court, arrested Chinmayanand about a month later.
The SIT also arrested the student after a complaint that she and her friends had tried to extort Rs 5 crore from Chinmayanand, threatening to make public videos showing her giving massages to him.
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