The Supreme Court on Monday pulled up courts in Odisha for mandating that people from Adivasi and Dalit communities involved in anti-mining protests clean police stations to secure bail.
According to recent reports, the Orissa High Court passed around 50 orders that made cleaning police stations a bail condition.
Hearing a suo motu case, a bench comprising Chief Justice of India Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi said such orders violate human rights and strike at the dignity of individuals, noting that the trend highlights caste bias in the judiciary against marginalised communities, legal news websites reported.
Calling such orders “obnoxious” and saying they bring a “bad name” to the judiciary, the bench observed: “It has been rightly reported that it exposes bias in the judiciary, since the accused belong to marginalised communities and are thus subjected to such burdensome requirements.
“It has been submitted that such conditions are not imposed while granting bail to those who are well-off. The nature of these conditions is so cruel and abhorrent that it has the potential to project the Odisha judiciary as caste-based,” the bench added, as reported by legal news websites..
The top court cited that around 40 such individuals had been arrested, and while some were granted bail by the Orissa High Court, certain unprecedented conditions were imposed such as requiring them to clean police stations for about two months.
It added that, in another order, the Orissa High Court, while granting bail to a petitioner, had passed a similar directive, and that the same kind of order had also been issued in the Laxman Nayak case.
The case of Laxman Nayak (often referred to alongside Kumeswar Naik and Hiramal Naik) , which emerged from grassroots resistance against bauxite mining in the Tijimali hills of the Rayagada district, is part of a series of controversial judicial orders in Odisha.
Laxman Nayak is an Adivasi activist and member of the Maa Mati Mali Surakhya Manch, a group formed to protect ancestral lands from a mining project by Vedanta Ltd. In late 2024 and early 2025, several activists were arrested following a crackdown on protests. The police alleged that the protesters had engaged in rioting and obstructed public officials.