Anticipatory Bail Law in India

Anticipatory bail or say pre arrest bail means when any person has reason to believe that he may be arrested on accusation of having committed a non bailable offense, he may apply to the Court of Session or the High Court; to direct that in the event of such arrest, he shall be released on bail. According to the section 438 of The Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC), the Court of Session and the High Court are authorized to entertain the Anticipatory bail applications. There are certain guidelines mentioned in the section on which it is decided by the court that whether anticipatory bail should be granted or not. Then to keep the person within reach so that he doesn’t try to flee away or affect the investigation the courts can impose conditions on the person to whom anticipatory bail is to be granted and if the person is found disobeying the condition imposed on him by the court the anticipatory bail would stand cancel and so the person can be arrested. The reason behind putting such provision in the code is to prevent the innocent persons from being implicated in false cases by powerful peoples or any other, and so anticipatory bail has to be granted only in exceptional cases where it appears to the court that the person seeking anticipatory bail is being framed in the charge. Anticipatory bail stands valid till the conclusion of the trial or unless it is canceled under section 439 of the code. The High court and the Court of Session have concurrent powers to consider anticipatory bail application. But since the state legislature have been given requisite powers to amend the provisions of the code, subject to the other provisions of the constitution, so states likes Maharashtra, Orissa, West Bengal have a little different anticipatory bail provisions, where as Uttar Pradesh does has even omitted provision of Section 438, and so there is nothing like Anticipatory bail in state of Uttar Pradesh. As most things have a dark side so do this provision of the code. The idea behind enacting this law was to prevent the innocent from getting trapped but with time the picture has changed and know persons accused of heinous offences are invoking it repeatedly, which was not the intent of the relief giving provision, which is a big concern.