Aryan Khan granted bail by Bombay high court in drugs case

The Bombay high court has granted bail to film star Shah Rukh Khan's son Aryan Khan in the cruise ship 'drug bust' case. Two others held with Aryan on 2 October, Munmun Dhamecha and Arbaaz Merchant, have also been granted bail.

A single-judge bench of justice Nitin Sambre reserved the technical details of the order for tomorrow when the conditions for bail will be pronounced. Aryan, who has spent almost three weeks in Mumbai's Arthur Road Jail, and the others will be released tomorrow after the conditions are fulfilled.

Aryan and the others had applied for bail in the high court on Monday after being denied bail by the special NDPS (Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act) court on 20 October.

Aryan, Dhamecha and Merchant were arrested by the Narcotics Control Bureau (NCB) during a raid on a cruise ship off the coast of Mumbai late on 2 October. They were remanded in judicial custody on 7 October by the metropolitan magistrate's court but were denied bail because of lack of jurisdiction.

Aryan Khan was represented in the Bombay high court by senior advocate Mukul Rohatgi, who argued that his client could not be held responsible for what the NCB recovered from Merchant or the others. Rohatgi, a former attorney general of India, also argued that the WhatsApp chats being cited by the agency as evidence of a conspiracy to procure narcotics were from an earlier period.

The legal website BarandBench.com cited Rahtogi as stating, "The WhatsApp chats, they were of the time period of 2018. None of the chats are from the cruise. There is no case where those chats with “123” have anything to do with this saga. Those chats, we will have to see in trial, to be proved. The chats have nothing to do with the current scenario and, therefore, to use a general phrase like conspiracy is not right (sic)."

The website quoted additional solicitor general Anil Singh, who is representing the NCB, as saying, "It cannot be a coincidence that so many people on the cruise, eight, were found with drugs and there was multiple varieties (sic)."

The NCB also insisted that in cases under the NDPS Act, 'bail is not a rule'.

Rohatgi responded that Aryan could not be held, without any proof of conspiracy, for the crimes of others. According to BarandBench.com, he submitted, "If there are people in a hotel in different rooms and they smoke, are all people in the hotel in conspiracy? There is no material for calling it a conspiracy in this case."