The Supreme Court is expanding the scope of personal liberty, even as vigilantism on the ground curtails the right to life and liberty in various parts of the country. After unambiguously determining, in the privacy judgment, that the right to privacy lay immanent in the fundamental rights explicitly guaranteed by the Constitution, the Supreme Court’s decision on Thursday to strike down illiberal provisions of the Prevention of Money Laundering Act ( PMLA ) takes the cause of democracy forward.It has been decades since Justice VR Krishna Iyer wrote that grant of bail should be the default judicial reflex, unless explicit countervailing reasons exist to deny bail. Yet, India’s jails are stuffed with lakhs of undertrials, whose fundamental rights to life and liberty and against discrimination and arbitrariness stand abrogated in practice. The present judgment by Justice Rohinton Nariman and Sanjay Kishen Kaul provides grounds for optimism that the presumption of innocence unless proven guilty would apply to people accused of crimes other than money laundering as well.PMLA’s section 45(1) held that for a person suspected of being in possession of the proceeds of crime punishable by more than three years in jail, bail would be available on the stringent condition that if a public prosecutor opposes bail, after being given a mandatory opportunity to oppose a PMLA detainee’s bail application, the court can grant bail only if it is convinced that the accused is not guilty. This turns on its head not only the notion that an accused would be deemed innocent till proven guilty but also the very logic of prosecution and trial: the judge is obliged to take a call on the innocence of the accused before the trial and prosecution.The two-judge Supreme Court bench pointed out another anomaly with regard to the bail provision. Such stringent conditions do not apply when someone applies for anticipatory bail to prevent being taken into custody for charges of money laundering. But once arrested, his chances of getting bail virtually vanish.The 2012 amendment to the Prevention of Money Laudering Act of 2002, amended in 2005 and 2009, widened the scope of money laundering to concealment, acquisition, possession and use of the proceeds of crime. The expansive scope of these terms and the tough bail conditions that would follow arrest make this aharsh law not just for those who launder money but for potentially anyone who falls foul of the powers that be.In a country where fake encounters are not all that rare and the killers in uniform walk away as honourable men, if not as heroes, and their political masters stay beyond the reach of the law, it is not all that difficult to imagine political activists of the inconvenient kind being caught with piles of cash, being charged with possessing proceeds of crime and being detained indefinitely with no hope of bail, leave alone early acquittal after trial.While this has not quite happened, it is thanks to the rudiments of functional democracy the Indian polity still retains. Yet such democracy cannot be taken for granted when majoritarian impunity is increasingly taken for granted by lawless elements who kill and maim in the name of the cow, or, as the experience of three Muslim men travelling on a train to western Uttar Pradesh on Thursday and got bashed up for tying a piece of cloth around their head showed, for being Muslim.The Courts can uphold the law, clarify legal principle and delineate as illegal certain kinds of conduct. But actual enforcement of the law is up to the executive. It is up to the executive to crack down on vigilante attacks. It is up to the political leadership that controls the executive to send out a clear message that such sectarian violence would not be tolerated.As judicial clarity mounts on the scope of liberty within India’s legal infrastructure, it would be reasonable to expect state conduct that falls short on every citizen’s right to life, liberty and equality would also fall foul of the law in the eyes of the judiciary as well.