Supreme Court Agrees To Hear Plea Challenging Anticipatory Bail Granted To Film Actor Vijay Babu By Kerala HC

The Supreme Court will tomorrow hear the plea of a Kerala actor who was alleged to have been raped by Actor-Producer Vijay Babu. The plea of the Kerala Actor challenges the High Court's order which granted Anticipatory Bail to Babu.

Senior Advocate Jaideep Gupta mentioned the matter before the vacation bench of Justice Indira Banerjee and Justice J. K. Maheshwari. He sought urgent listing of the matter and stated that, "It is a matter in which anticipatory bail has been granted to a person who had initially ran away to Dubai and then to Georgia and returned to India only because his passport was impounded here." Expressing urgency in the matter, he submitted that "The order states that his interrogation is to be done from 27th June to 3rd July."

The counsel for the complainant added that, "He has gone on Facebook live and has mentioned my name to the whole world and is putting pressure to withdraw the complaint. Each day he spends out it is a risk to me."

A lookout notice was issued against Vijay Babu, as he went into hiding since he got to know of the registration of crimes. Babu filed an application seeking anticipatory bail before the Kerala High Court, which on June 22 was allowed the same subject to conditions.

The High Court had while allowing the anticipatory bail also confirmed the maintainability of the application for anticipatory bail filed while the applicant is residing outside the country.

Care must be taken to avoid consensual relationships being converted into instances of rape, the Kerala High Court had said while granting ancitipatory bail to Vijay Babu.

Subsequently, another single bench of the Kerala High Court has referred to the Chief Justice of the High Court the question of whether a bail application under Section 438 Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPc) can be entertained when the accused person has absconded from India and went abroad.