India’s Supreme Court on Monday denied bail to two student activists detained for more than five years without a full trial under anti-terrorism laws on allegations of orchestrating a conspiracy to trigger deadly riots in 2020.
Five others detained on similar charges were granted bail, but the Supreme Court said in its verdict that “Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam stand on a qualitatively different footing as compared to other accused.”
The court said that the “prolonged incarceration” of Khalid and Imam was not sufficient justification to grant them bail and that the pair had played a “central role in the conspiracy.”
Khalid and Imam, both 38 years old, were detained after the February 2020 sectarian riots in Delhi when 53 people were killed, most of them Muslims but also several Hindus. They have made several similar failed attempts to secure bail but are still awaiting a full trial or conviction.
The case has often been highlighted by critics who say India’s more than 200 million Muslims face discriminatory treatment under the Hindu nationalist governance of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his BJP.
US lawmakers, rigths groups call for full and fair trial
Eight US lawmakers wrote an appeal to India’s ambassador in Washington last week, expressing concern over Khalid’s prolonged pretrial detention.
The Democrat Senators and House members called for him to be granted a fair and timely hearing, and said the case “raises serious questions about due process, human rights and India’s obligations under international law.”
International human rights groups have also frequently sought to highlight the case.
In September, to mark the five-year anniversary of Khalid’s detention, Amnesty International wrote that Khalid’s “imprisonment without trial exemplifies derailment of justice” and was “emblematic of a broader pattern of repression faced by those who dare to exercise their rights to freedom of expression.”
Unrest amid criticism of new citizenship and security laws
Considerable public protests against India’s new Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA, and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) — both introduced in 2019 — provided the backdrop for the riots.
Muslim opponents in particular accused the Hindu nationalist BJP government of tailoring the rule changes to discriminate against them.
The unrest also came as US President Donald Trump, then nearing the end of his first term in office, was making a high-profile visit to see India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, meaning that security was tight and nerves heightened in the capital.
Khalid and Imam were prominent student activists at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University. Khalid had already been detained in 2016 on sedition charges after a protest at the university against the executions of 2001 Indian Parliament terror attack convict Afza Guru and Kashmiri separatist Maqbool Bhat.
Delhi police strongly opposed Khalid and Imam’s bail request at the latest bail hearing, arguing that the violence was not a spontaneous outbreak but rather a deliberate plot seeking to tarnish India’s global image. They alleged that the defendants made provocative speeches and instigated violence.
Khalid and Imam’s lawyers, meanwhile, argued that there was no evidence linking them to the charges.
Edited by: Kieran Burke
