High court trials aren’t typically prolonged until virtually midnight. But Friday night in Hyderabad was an exception. The stakes were very high. Bandhu Sai Bageerath, who belongs to the Union Minister of State for Home Affairs Bandhu Sanjay Kumar, was desperately trying to get a stay on arrest. He didn’t get it
The Telangana High Court, presided by Justice T. Madhavi Devi, sitting on a vacation bench, denied any relief for the time being. She heard hours of high-powered and heated discussion before coming up with a cold reality check. She said she ‘had glanced at the minor victim’s statement’. Assuming from that initial read, she didn’t block the police from doing their job. This was a devastating blow to the defence team. They were looking for a legal safeguard until the final order comes next Thursday. Rather, they walked away from the courtroom without any of them having anything in hand, leaving their client without any sense of protection as the police were pursuing him.
Two Competing Narratives
The whole ordeal is a legal tangle that pits one timeline against another and conflicting police statements. It all went up in smoke in public on the 8th of May. The mother of the 17-year-old girl who reported the abuse made the complaint at the Petbasheerabad police station, claiming that the incident occurred late last year. The accusations are harsh. The family alleges that Bageerath enticed the teen to enter a relationship, promising marriage. They claim that since October and up to December 2025, he made her drink, and subjected her to harsh sexual assault, mostly at a farmhouse in Moinabad.
It was a sexual harassment charge that the police initially book him for. However, it went quickly from there. Investigators sat down and formally took the girl’s statement and that’s when the charges became much heavier. They added section 5(1) on to section 6 of the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act. The particular section specifies aggravated penetrative sexual assault. A non-bailable charge and an extremely damaging one at that. It is punishable by a huge prison sentence in case of conviction.
The victim’s mother just made a frantic public announcement. She implored the internet not to spread images that identify her daughter. She further accused of serious intimidation, saying the family had gone to the residence of the Union Minister in late April for help but they left in panic of political ramifications
The Extortion Defense
Senior counsel S. Niranjan Reddy leads Bageerath’s legal team which fights a vicious counter-offensive. They are basically creating a grand narrative that the entire POCSO case is a “hit-job. The main weapon they have is a separate FIR filed on the same day on May 8 in Karimnagar. The key factor is the timing. Bageerath had filed his complaint a few hours before the girl’s family came to Petbasheerabad station
The defense side turns things upside down. They say it was a huge honey trap. Bageerath claims that family members coerced him to marry the girl and, when he declined, demanded a whopping five crore rupees. He even alleges that he gave them a hundred and a half thousand rupees in panic to keep them quiet. During the court proceedings, his defense lawyers submitted a sealed envelope that was rumored to include WhatsApp conversations and phone logs to prove that there was no consensual element to the relationship.
Reddy also threw a big monkey wrench into the age of the victim’s prosecution. The defense unearthed an old 2021 police charge sheet of an underage driving incident that involved the girl. The document listed her age as 15 on that particular document. If she is presently 15 years old in 2021, she will be legally an adult by the end of 2025. That is their basis of arguing that they should throw away even the POCSO charges altogether. The prosecution was very vigorous, saying that her birth certificate has been confirmed and she is now 17 years and 3 months old.
Social Media Smears and Judicial Frustration
This one can’t help but face so much external pressure. It’s really lethal. Even before the hearing on the Friday night began, Justice Madhavi Devi had to deal with the elephant in the room. She could tell she was upset. A smear campaign was in full swing, and she was the target. The coordinated effort was going around social media, trying to pin political motives on her just for taking the bail plea.
She asked the lawyers if they were having a problem with her hearing the case, and said she would recuse herself on the spot. She was asked to stay by both sides and they both retreated. However, the atmosphere in the room was electric.
It became so loud and loud that Bandi Sanjay Kumar finally resorted to civil court. He got a big, wide, broad gag order on Friday. The City Civil Court directed all TV channels, YouTube channels and social media to immediately remove any defamatory material associated with Union Minister directly with his son’s legal fiasco. It’s an emergency remedy for damage control, while the political situation keeps getting worse.
The Ground Hunt
As the lawyers go through the motions and the birth certificate gets lost, things on the ground are happening fast. Bageerath has officially fled the scene! He had avoided a formal police summons last week, when he allegedly left a letter for the officers asking for “two more days” to collect documents. That excuse was not funny to the Cyberabad Police.
Presently, five highly specialized police teams are searching for him. They have issued a Look Out Circular to prevent him fleeing from the country. CDRs and IP tracking are being ripped apart to determine where he is actually located. The political machine is also in full swing. Chief Minister Revanth Reddy issued a clarion call to the Director General of Police to constitute a Special Investigation Team for this crisis, saying the lack of the local cops’ prompt action in the early hours of the complaint was a mystery to him.
All the pressure is on defense right now. They have to wait until May 21, when the court reconvenes to pronounce the final order on the anticipatory bail. In the meantime Bageerath is unprotected and out of reach of the law.
