SC to hear plea against grant of bail to Chinmayanand

New Delhi: The Supreme Court Thursday said it would hear on February 24 the plea against the Allahabad High Court order granting bail to former BJP lawmaker Swami Chinmayanand in an alleged rape case lodged by a law student.

A bench, comprising Chief Justice S A Bobde and Justices B R Gavai and Surya Kant, took note of the submissions of senior advocate Colin Gonsalves that the appeal against the high court order be accorded an urgent hearing.

The bench said it would consider hearing the appeal of the alleged victim next Monday.

The high court had on February 3 granted bail to Chinmayanand, a former Union minister 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 September 20 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.