A court in Shillong has granted bail to Sonam Raghuvanshi, a 25-year-old businesswoman from Indore who had been lodged in the District Prison and Correctional Home since her arrest in June 2025.
The order, passed on April 27, 2026, by Addl. D.C. (Judicial) Smti D.R. Kharbteng of the East Khasi Hills district court, came in what was the fourth bail application filed on her behalf.
At the heart of the decision was not merely the length of her detention, but a fundamental question about whether her constitutional rights were violated at the very moment of her arrest — a question whose answer ultimately set her free. For now at least.
Raghuvanshi had been arrested on June 9, 2025, from Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh, in connection with Session Case No. 41(T)/2025, registered on the basis of an FIR lodged at Sohra Police Station following the recovery of the dead body of one Raja Raghuvanshi. She was charged under Sections 103(1), 238(a), 309(6), and 3(6) of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS).
A chargesheet was filed on September 5, 2025, and charges were formally framed against her on October 28, 2025.
A supplementary chargesheet, filed in February 2026, added Arms Act charges and brought in a new co-accused. By the time the bail order was passed, Raghuvanshi had spent more than ten months in custody, with the trial effectively stalled for over two months following the supplementary chargesheet.
The Constitutional Argument That Proved Decisive
The argument that ultimately convinced the court to grant bail was not about the evidence or the severity of the charges. It was about what happened — or more precisely, what did not happen — in the moments after Raghuvanshi was arrested.
Her counsel raised a clear constitutional challenge. At the time of Sonam Raghuvanshi’s arrest, the police had not complied with Article 22(1) of the Constitution of India. This article guarantees every arrested person the right to be informed of the grounds of arrest ‘as soon as may be.’
The counsel argued that Sonam Raghuvanshi received a blank pro forma document—a checklist titled ‘Intimation of Grounds of Arrest.’ None of the checkboxes was ticked. Importantly, the document referred to Section 403(1) BNS, while the actual FIR was under Section 103(1) BNS, a notably different offence.
The defence said this meant Sonam Raghuvanshi was never meaningfully told why she was arrested or what she was suspected of.
The prosecution argued that this was a late plea, raised for the first time in the fourth bail application. They said the arrest memo was duly signed by the accused and witnesses.
According to them, failing to tick checkboxes was a curable procedural irregularity. They relied on the Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling in State of Karnataka v. Sri Darshan. That decision held that such procedural lapses do not automatically invalidate custody or entitle one to bail, unless prejudice is shown.
The court, however, found that Darshan’s case was distinguishable on the facts. In that case, the accused had been informed of the arrest grounds orally and served written grounds shortly thereafter; the arrest memos had been countersigned and produced before the Magistrate.
None of those conditions applied here. The court took note of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Vihaan Kumar v. State of Haryana (2025), which had conclusively held that informing an arrested person of the grounds of arrest is a mandatory constitutional requirement — not a formality.
The burden of proving compliance with Article 22(1), the Supreme Court had clarified, rests squarely with the investigating agency, not the accused.
A Paper Trail That Told the Wrong Story
What made the court’s findings particularly damaging to the prosecution was the consistency of the error across every single document related to Raghuvanshi’s arrest.
The court examined the checklist for justification of arrest, the memo of arrest, the inspection memo, the intimation of rights of the arrested person, and the extract of the case diary.
In every single one of these documents, the sections cited were Sohra PS Case No. 7/2025 under Section 403(1) BNS, not Section 103(1) BNS, which is the provision dealing with murder and under which she was actually being prosecuted.
The prosecution had tried to pass this off as a clerical error, but the court was unpersuaded. When the same wrong section number appears across every document generated at the time of arrest, it cannot reasonably be attributed to a one-time typographical mistake.
The court observed that this demonstrated that sufficient knowledge of the facts constituting the grounds of arrest had not been effectively communicated to the petitioner in clear terms, and that prejudice had consequently been caused to her defence.
The court also observed that there was nothing on record to indicate that Sonam Raghuvanshi was represented by a lawyer when she was first produced before the court at Ghazipur — a significant point, because one of the key protections that Article 22(1) is designed to enable is the right of an arrested person to consult a legal practitioner. If she did not know the actual charges against her, she could not meaningfully exercise that right.
Why the Delay in Trial Also Mattered
While the constitutional violation formed the primary basis for bail, the court also took note of the broader circumstances of Raghuvanshi’s detention. She had been in custody for over ten months. Of the 90 witnesses listed by the prosecution, only four had been examined.
The trial had come to a standstill since February 3, 2026, following the filing of the supplementary chargesheet, which added a new accused and new sections, requiring the entire charge-framing process to be conducted afresh. The court accepted the argument that the accused could not be subjected to indefinite pre-conviction detention through no fault of her own.
The principle of speedy trial, long recognised as a fundamental right, ran through the defence arguments. Courts across the country, including the Supreme Court in Manish Sisodia v. Directorate of Enforcement and Javed Gulam Nabi Sheikh v. State of Maharashtra, have consistently held that when trial delay is not attributable to the accused, it becomes a legitimate ground for bail.
Here, the stalling of proceedings was directly caused by developments on the prosecution’s side — the supplementary chargesheet, the summoning of a new accused, and the resultant procedural requirements — none of which Raghuvanshi had any hand in.
In the end, the court directed her release on bail subject to standard conditions: she must not abscond or tamper with evidence or witnesses, must attend court on every date, must not leave the court’s jurisdiction without permission, and must execute a personal bond of Rs 50,000 with two sureties of like amount.
The application was allowed and disposed of. The case serves as a stark reminder that constitutional protections at the time of arrest are not administrative box-ticking exercises — they are enforceable rights, and their violation has real legal consequences.
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