Two Bombay High Court orders, two different theories of Indian justice

On 12 June 2026, the Bombay High Court asked the National Investigation Agency (NIA) to file a reply to a plea from P. Varavara Rao, the 85-year-old former professor of English and accused in the long-running Elgaar Parishad case, seeking permission to permanently reside in Hyderabad, according to reporting from The Indian Express. The same court, hours later, granted bail to two employees of a Goregaon exhibition centre charged in connection with the deaths of concert-goers from suspected drug overdoses. The two orders were issued on the same day, by the same bench system, in the same city — and they sit at opposite ends of India's debate over what its criminal-justice system is actually built to do.

The structural argument here is not about any single accused person. It is about prosecutorial discretion, the speed of justice, and the cost of delay. One case involves a man who, his lawyers and family say, has spent years shuttling between prison and hospital. The other involves two employees caught up in a mass-casualty event. The court is being asked to make a fundamentally different kind of judgment in each, and the two rulings together illuminate how Indian courts ration mercy.

A plea to die at home

Rao, who taught English for decades and is a well-known public intellectual in Telugu-speaking civil-society circles, has been named as an accused in the Elgaar Parishad case — a prosecution the NIA inherited from the Pune police in 2021 and which links an alleged Maoist conspiracy to a public meeting in Pune on 31 December 2017. He has been in and out of custody since 2018. Multiple reports over the years have detailed his deteriorating health; the Indian Express's 12 June 2026 report notes that the court is now asking the agency to respond to his application to settle permanently in Hyderabad, where his family is based.

The Elgaar Parishad matter is a textbook case of what Indian defence lawyers have come to call 'custodial delay' — the slow grind of a prosecution that, even when the accused is granted temporary medical bail, keeps the case hanging over the person indefinitely. The NIA's own charge sheets have argued that the Pune gathering was part of a coordinated plan to destabilise the state. The accused, including Rao, have denied the allegations and framed the case as a politically motivated use of the anti-terror statute. Both versions are on the record; neither has yet produced a verdict.

Bail, briefly, in the Goregaon case

The same day, in a separate matter, the Bombay High Court granted bail to two employees of the NESCO exhibition centre in Goregaon — a Mumbai suburb — where, in late 2024, several concert-goers died after taking what investigators have described as adulterated MDMA. The Indian Express's 12 June 2026 dispatch on the bail order does not name the two employees in its headline but indicates they were working at the venue on the night of the deaths. The charge sheet, as reported across Indian outlets, has named more than a dozen accused, including alleged suppliers, and has framed the venue employees as participants in a permissive environment that enabled the sale of the substances.

Bail in the Indian system is a matter of right for offences carrying a fixed term of less than the death penalty, but in practice the decision is judicial discretion — guided by flight risk, the likelihood of tampering with evidence, and the severity of the charge. The fact that two lower-level employees were granted bail while the alleged suppliers continue in custody reflects a pattern common in Indian mass-casualty prosecutions: the courts distinguish between those who allegedly enabled the harm and those who allegedly caused it.

The two theories of justice

Read the two orders together and an uncomfortable pattern emerges. In the Elgaar Parishad matter, an 85-year-old man whose trial has not produced a verdict in roughly eight years is being told — at every step — to wait a little longer. In the Goregaon matter, the same court, on the same day, is willing to release on bail people whose alleged role in a much more recent and much more public tragedy is, on its face, less direct.

There is a plausible alternative reading. The court in the Goregaon matter is not saying the two employees are innocent; it is saying that continued pretrial detention is disproportionate to their alleged role. The court in the Elgaar Parishad matter may be saying that, however sympathetic Rao's health situation is, the underlying case still requires an NIA response before the relief of permanent return can be granted. Both decisions can be defended in their own terms. But the aggregate pattern is harder to defend without acknowledging the role of prosecutorial stubbornness in one case and prosecutorial restraint in the other.

The structural point — the larger pattern these events sit inside — is that India's counter-terror and organised-crime prosecutions operate on dramatically different timelines depending on which statute is invoked, which agency is in charge, and which accused is politically legible. The NIA's slow-motion pace in long-running political cases has been criticised by both defence lawyers and retired judges; the same agency can move quickly when the case carries moral weight across the political spectrum, as the Goregaon deaths did. The court inherits those rhythms, and the accused inherit the consequences.

Stakes and what remains contested

For Rao and his co-accused, the stakes are literal. A man in his mid-eighties, with documented medical history, is being asked to litigate his right to die in his own house through the same NIA that has been investigating him for years. For the two Goregaon employees, the stakes are less existential but still serious: a criminal record, a pending trial, the social cost of being publicly associated with a mass-casualty event. The families of the dead in the Goregaon matter may read the bail order as a sign that the system is moving too quickly on the periphery while the actual suppliers are harder to reach.

What remains genuinely contested is whether the NIA's response, when it eventually lands, will engage with the medical and humanitarian case for Rao's return home, or will argue that the trial's integrity requires him to remain within the court's territorial reach. The sources do not specify what the NIA's position will be, and there is no public indication of a timeline. The two employees in the Goregaon case, similarly, remain under the court's conditions of bail, the terms of which are not detailed in the available reporting. On one point, however, the record is clear: the Bombay High Court on 12 June 2026 produced two decisions that, taken together, say more about the architecture of Indian criminal justice than either would say on its own.

How Monexus framed this: the wires reported two distinct procedural orders on the same day. We connected them — not to claim a single cause, but to show the contrast the wires left sitting in two separate briefs.