Why is it that after all these decades of case law that Indian courts still struggle to agree on when is a defendant eligible for bail? It is both extraordinary and disconcerting how routinely constitutional courts like the Supreme Court of India (SCI) and the High Courts (HCs) disagree with each other on this question. The highest court in the land routinely adjudicates on bail yet its rulings end up creating even more ambiguities, precipitating yet another merry-go-round. This is neither the rule of law nor that of legal pluralism. Now granted that different categories of crime under different legislations may have made this a difficult enterprise to begin with but it is equally difficult to avoid the notion that on occasions officers of the court are just making it up as they go along. They have the discretion to both “relax” the conditions for bail in one instance without giving a definite reason and to also cancel the bail in another instance when it does not pass muster with their mood << https://indianexpress.com/article/india/supreme-court-eased-bail-norms-in-ed-cases-a-new-ruling-turns-the-clock-back-9835127/ >>.

Leaving aside the scope of corruption that this ambiguity regarding something as basic as bail creates in the criminal justice system, how should we make sense of this unfortunate reality? Is it simply a case of leveraging law to ensure bargaining of interests between branches of the government or is there a deeper institutional and methodological lacuna that prevents us from evolving a conclusive understanding of procedural parity?

Appreciate your answer but I also find it unsatisfactory. As I said in my post, bail is not supposed to be such a complex subject so as to be restricted only to the specialists in criminal law. You do not even have to be a lawyer to talk about the institutional context in which law is practised. We have so many students of law on this forum. Surely, they must have thought about the practice of law and where the subject of bail has historically occupied an important part. One does not have to practice criminal law to speak on habeas corpus.