Allahabad HC Revokes Rs 64 Lakh Fixed Deposit Bail Condition After Trial Stalls for Over a Decade
Justice Subhash Vidyarthi held that a bail order is an interlocutory order, not a final order, and Section 362 CrPC cannot bar the High Court from modifying onerous bail conditions under Section 482.
The Lucknow Bench of the Allahabad High Court, in an application filed under Section 482 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, has revoked a condition imposed in a 2013 bail order requiring the applicant to maintain a fixed deposit of Rs 64,00,000 in favour of the Airports Authority of India. Justice Subhash Vidyarthi, sitting singly, held that a bail order is merely an interlocutory order and does not constitute a “judgment or final order disposing of a case” within the meaning of Section 362 CrPC. The bar against alteration contained in Section 362, the court found, has no application to such orders. With the underlying trial having ground to a halt and the trial court having consigned its records, the court directed the release of the deposited amount — together with accrued interest — within thirty days.
The Dispute Before the Court
The matter traces its origin to FIR No. RC0062011A0013 dated 15 July 2011, registered by the CBI alleging corruption in the submission of forged bills for cement supply during the execution of a project titled “Expansion of Apron, Construction of Additional Taxiway and Allied Works at Varanasi Airport.” The FIR named seven accused persons, including five government servants and a company. The applicant, Baldev Raj Arora, was not named in the FIR.
During investigation, the CBI found that the applicant, a Director of M/s B.R. Arora Private Limited — a constituent member of M/s Bright Aracon — had played a significant role in submitting inflated bills. He was arraigned as an accused in the charge-sheet filed on 30 October 2013 for offences under Sections 120-B, 420, 468 and 471 IPC and Sections 13(2) read with 13(1)(d) of the Prevention of Corruption Act, 1988. The trial court took cognizance on 12 November 2013. On 19 December 2013, this Court enlarged the applicant on bail subject to, among other conditions, depositing Rs 64,00,000 as a fixed deposit in a nationalised bank in favour of the Airports Authority of India, renewable until the conclusion of trial.
Charges were framed against the co-accused government servants on 14 April 2015. The applicant himself was charged only under Section 420 IPC and discharged of all remaining charges.
Subsequent developments significantly altered the complexion of the proceedings. Three co-accused government servants challenged the prosecution sanction order dated 1 October 2013. By an order dated 17 December 2021 passed in Application under Section 482 No. 3274 of 2018, this Court quashed the prosecution sanction order, the cognizance order dated 12 November 2013, and the trial court's order dated 6 January 2018 rejecting the challenge to the sanction. The Supreme Court dismissed SLP Nos. 4006–4008 of 2022 challenging that order on 1 October 2024. The trial court thereafter, by order dated 13 May 2022, closed the proceedings and consigned the records, while noting that the records should not be weeded out in case circumstances changed.
The applicant sought modification of the Rs 64 lakh deposit condition through the present application, contending that with the trial at a standstill and his age now 77 years, the continuance of the condition was causing a manifest failure of justice.
The Legal Issue: Does Section 362 CrPC Bar Modification of a Bail Condition?
The CBI raised a preliminary objection that the application was barred by Section 362 CrPC, which prohibits any court from altering or reviewing a judgment or final order disposing of a case, save for correction of clerical or arithmetical errors. Senior counsel for the CBI submitted that the bail order dated 19 December 2013 had attained finality, that the High Court became functus officio once it decided the bail application, and that modifying the condition would amount to sitting in appeal over a coordinate bench's order.
Reliance was placed on a coordinate bench's decision in Aparna Purohit v. State of U.P., Application under Section 482 No. 6022 of 2022 (decided 2 November 2022), which had held that once a bail or anticipatory bail application is finally disposed of, the bench becomes functus officio and Section 482 cannot be used to modify conditions in such an order. The CBI also argued that two later coordinate bench decisions in Vinod Kumar Sharma v. CBI: 2023 (12) ADJ 743 and Vivek Yadav v. State (decided 21 February 2024), which had permitted modification, were per incuriam for failing to notice Aparna Purohit.
The applicant's Senior Counsel countered that Section 482 CrPC preserves the inherent powers of the High Court to secure the ends of justice, and that those powers are not fettered by a bar that does not, on a proper reading, apply to bail orders at all.
How the Bench Reasoned
Justice Vidyarthi approached the question by examining what Section 362 CrPC actually covers. The provision bars alteration or review of a “judgment or final order disposing of a case.” The court turned to the definition of “judgment” in Section 353 CrPC, which places judgments in Chapter XXVII and confines them to final orders in a trial terminating in conviction or acquittal. The final orders enumerated in Sections 356, 357, 357-A, 357-B, 357-C, 358, 359 and 360 CrPC, which also fall within Chapter XXVII, do not include an order allowing a bail application.
On this textual foundation, the court moved to settled Supreme Court authority. In Amar Nath v. State of Haryana: (1977) 4 SCC 137, the Supreme Court had described bail orders as orders “in aid of the pending proceeding” that amount to interlocutory orders against which no revision lies under Section 397(2). A four-judge bench in V.C. Shukla v. State through CBI: 1980 Supp SCC 92 adopted the same test of finality. In Usmanbhai Dawoodbhai Memon v. State of Gujarat: (1988) 2 SCC 271, the Supreme Court stated plainly: “It cannot be doubted that the grant or refusal of a bail application is essentially an interlocutory order. There is no finality to such an order for an application for bail can always be renewed from time to time.”
Crucially, the Supreme Court's recent decision in Ramadhar Sahu v. State of Madhya Pradesh, Criminal Appeal No. 3223 of 2023, directly addressed this point. The Supreme Court held that “conditions of bail could also be varied if a case is made out for such variation based on that factor” and that “prohibition contemplated in Section 362 of the Code would not apply in such cases.”
Against this line of authority, Justice Vidyarthi found that the coordinate bench decision in Aparna Purohit (the 2022 Section 482 application) was itself a per incuriam judgment: it had decided the issue without noticing the definition of “judgment” in Section 353 CrPC, the final orders catalogued in Sections 356 to 360 CrPC, or the Supreme Court judgments establishing that bail orders are interlocutory. Since Aparna Purohit was per incuriam and therefore not a binding precedent, the decisions in Vinod Kumar Sharma and Vivek Yadav, which had taken the contrary view, could not be said to be per incuriam for ignoring it.
On the scope of the court's inherent powers, Justice Vidyarthi drew on the Supreme Court's observations in Asian Resurfacing of Road Agency (P) Ltd. v. CBI: (2018) 16 SCC 299, which held that inherent powers of the High Court flow from Article 215 of the Constitution — the High Court's status as a court of record — and are not conferred by Section 482 CrPC. Section 482, on this view, merely preserves those powers by providing that nothing in the Code shall limit or affect them. The court also noted that in Simrikhia v. Dolley Mukherjee: (1990) 2 SCC 437, the Supreme Court had itself recognised that where there is a change in circumstances, the High Court may exercise its inherent powers to pass appropriate orders.
The court rejected the CBI's argument that the condition had attained finality simply by virtue of going unchallenged since 2013. Justice Vidyarthi observed that the applicant may well have hoped for expeditious conclusion of the trial. It was only after the trial court's order dated 13 May 2022 — closing proceedings and consigning records — that the indefinite continuance of the condition became clearly unjust. The consignment of records gave rise to a continuing cause of action, and the application could not be said to have been filed after unreasonable delay.
The Merits: Whether the Condition Warranted Revocation
Having rejected the preliminary objection, the court examined whether the condition itself should be revoked on the facts.
In Sumit Mehta v. State (NCT of Delhi): (2013) 15 SCC 570, the Supreme Court had set aside a condition requiring deposit of Rs 1 crore in a fixed deposit as a condition for anticipatory bail in a cheating case, holding that “any condition has to be interpreted as a reasonable condition acceptable in the facts permissible in the circumstance and effective in the pragmatic sense and should not defeat the order of grant of bail.” In Dilip Singh v. State of M.P.: (2021) 2 SCC 779, the Supreme Court reiterated that “a criminal court, exercising jurisdiction to grant bail/anticipatory bail, is not expected to act as a recovery agent to realise the dues of the complainant, and that too, without any trial.”
More recently, in Gajanan Dattatray Gore v. State of Maharashtra: 2025 SCC OnLine SC 1571, the Supreme Court directed that henceforth no trial court or High Court shall pass any order of grant of regular bail or anticipatory bail on any undertaking that the accused might be ready to furnish, and that bail pleas must be decided strictly on merits.
Justice Vidyarthi found that the condition of depositing Rs 64,00,000 in an FDR in favour of the Airports Authority of India had been imposed in 2013 without even a prima facie satisfaction regarding the guilt of the applicant — a practice deprecated and prohibited by the Supreme Court. The accumulated weight of subsequent events made the case for revocation compelling: the prosecution sanction order against the co-accused government servants had been quashed; the cognizance order stood set aside; the CBI's own criminal revision challenging the charge-framing order had neither been admitted nor resulted in any interim order; the trial court had consigned its records; and the passport condition had already been recalled by a coordinate bench in October 2024. The applicant, now 77 years old, had been deprived of his own funds, lying in a fixed deposit, with no realistic prospect of trial concluding in the foreseeable future — or, as the court observed, even within the applicant's lifetime.
Order
Justice Subhash Vidyarthi allowed Application U/s 482 No. 2459 of 2026 by order dated 2 July 2026. The condition imposed in the bail order dated 19 December 2013 in Bail Application No. 7625 of 2013, directing the applicant to deposit Rs 64,00,000 in the form of a fixed deposit in a nationalised bank in favour of the Airports Authority of India, was revoked. The court directed that the amount deposited in the fixed deposit, along with all interest accrued, be released in favour of the applicant within thirty days. The parties were directed to bear their own costs.