New Delhi, May 23 -- In an extraordinary institutional moment at the Supreme Court, an unprecedented clash of judicial views between two coordinate benches over bail jurisprudence under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) spilled into the open on Friday, with one of the criticised benches formally asking the Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant to constitute a larger bench for an "authoritative resolution" of the law. A bench of justices Aravind Kumar and PB Varale, while hearing bail pleas by Delhi riots accused Tasleem Ahmed and Khalid Saifi, referred to the CJI the larger question of how the Supreme Court's landmark three-judge ruling in Union of India Vs KA Najeeb (2021) ought to be applied in UAPA cases involving prolonged incarceration and delayed trials. The development came barely days after another two-judge bench comprising justices BV Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan openly criticised the January 5 judgment authored by Justice Kumar in the Delhi riots conspiracy case involving Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, holding that the earlier ruling had adopted an unduly restrictive understanding of bail under the anti-terror law. Friday's order effectively transformed that judicial disagreement into a formal institutional reference, setting the stage for a constitutionally significant reconsideration by a larger bench of how courts must reconcile national security concerns with personal liberty in anti-terror prosecutions. Also, it may finally settle the increasingly visible doctrinal divide that has emerged within the Supreme Court itself over the meaning and reach of KA Najeeb. Without directly adjudicating upon the correctness of the criticism levelled against its earlier decisions, the Justice Kumar-bench took a pointed view that a coordinate bench ought not to undermine another bench of equal strength through "strong observations" and should instead refer the matter to a larger bench if it harbours doubts regarding the correctness of an earlier ruling. "Judgments of this Court are not to be answered by counter-observations from another bench of equal strength. The discipline of precedence demands a higher institutional method," noted the bench. It added: "Where a coordinate bench entertains a reservation about an earlier judgment of another coordinate bench, particularly on the application of a binding 3-judge bench decision, the proper course is well settled. The matter must ordinarily be placed before the Chief Justice of India for the constitution of an appropriate bench." The bench said that while disagreements between coordinate benches were "neither unusual nor undesirable", institutional discipline required that such differences be resolved through an authoritative pronouncement by a larger bench rather than through competing judicial observations. "If a coordinate bench has expressed reservation about the manner in which KA Najeeb was followed by another coordinate bench, the proper answer is not further reservation but authoritative resolution," Justice Kumar observed. The bench accordingly directed that the matter be placed before the Chief Justice of India for constitution of an appropriate larger bench "to clarify or expound the position of law laid down in KA Najeeb, particularly in the backdrop of rigour of Section 43D(5)" of the UAPA. The court simultaneously granted interim bail for six months to Tasleem Ahmed and Khalid Saifi in the Delhi riots larger conspiracy case. The reference order marks a dramatic escalation in an increasingly visible divergence within the Supreme Court over the balance between personal liberty and national security in UAPA prosecutions. Earlier this week, the Nagarathna-Bhuyan bench, while granting bail to Syed Iftikhar Andrabi in a narco-terror case investigated by NIA, delivered one of the strongest judicial critiques in recent years of a coordinate bench ruling....