It has been six years since the February 2020 violence in North-East Delhi, in which some 53 people were killed and many people were injured. In the same year, one of us (Nidah Kaiser) wrote her master’s thesis on police action during this episode of violence. Since then, she has graduated with an MSc, completed her PhD, and begun her postdoctoral research. Meanwhile, the academic careers of two PhD scholars, Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, remain frozen in February 2020. While the case has not gone to trial, the Supreme Court, in its January 2026 Gulfisha Fatima & Others v. State (NCT of Delhi) judgment denied bail to Khalid and Imam, who have been incarcerated for more than half a decade now.

The judgment said Khalid and Imam had “engineered” the events, were “architects” of a conspiracy, were “drivers” (albeit “ideological”), “orchestrating” the incidents remotely; “acting” at various levels, phases, and moments; “directing”; “printing”; “drafting”; “meeting”; and “speaking”. The language used in the judgment assigned to Khalid and Imam agency, coordination, and intent before these are established through trial.

An RTI application filed by the writer and journalist Pankaj Chaturvedi, with a response dated March 10, 2026, from the Riot Cell, North-East District, Delhi Police, provides an update on the status of cases arising from the events of February 2020. A total of 757 cases were registered, of which 249 remain under investigation with charge sheets yet to be filed. Additionally, in 75 cases, the police filed a closure report due to insufficient evidence. In terms of outcome, 386 individuals have been acquitted across 109 cases, while only 51 individuals have been convicted in 22 cases. The data indicate that even six years later, a substantial number of cases remain unresolved, with acquittals outnumbering convictions.

Read alongside the Supreme Court’s reasoning in the Khalid-Imam bail judgment, these data underscore a troubling dissonance: while courts have been willing to accept expansive conspiracy claims at the stage of bail, the prosecutorial framework appears far less capable of sustaining convictions at trial or/and has failed to file charge sheets in one-third of the 757 cases registered in relation to riots that allegedly took place because of a pre-planned “conspiracy”.

This judgment, which bailed five of the seven appellants, represents one of the most consequential bail decisions under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), 1967, its significance deriving from the method it normalises. While the court claims to have adopted an individualised, context-specific approach and a calibrated reading of Article 21 of the Constitution, the reasoning employed in denying bail to Khalid and Imam reveals a structural deference to the state. In effect, the judgment does the following four things, each of which contributes to entrenching pretrial incarceration in political cases as a norm rather than an exception.

First problem: Court accepts police version uncritically

The first problem is the court’s near-complete reliance on the police narrative, constructed months after the incident. The judgment reproduces the prosecution’s chronology in considerable detail, including the FIR, the charge sheet, the alleged meetings between various activists, WhatsApp groups involving hundreds of students, speeches delivered across different States, and the purported conspiratorial chain of command linking anti-Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) protests to the February 2020 violence. In attributing a “conspiracy” of violence to Khalid and Imam, the court endorses the prosecution’s theory without independently examining it.

This uncritical acceptance of the police narrative is contrary to the standard laid down in the Vernon v. State of Maharashtra judgment, in which the Supreme Court said that the “prima facie true” test requires “at least surface-analysis of probative value of the evidence” at the bail stage. It thus marks a departure from settled bail jurisprudence that recognises that a police report is merely an opinion and must be subjected to independent judicial scrutiny.

This is evident in the court’s treatment of Imam. The court points to call detail record (CDR)/location material, a protected witness statement, and Imam’s speeches that are said to endorse “chakka jam” and disruption of essential services; it then concludes that the material, “taken cumulatively”, establishes the charges to be prima facie true.

While rejecting Imam’s bail, the judgment (from paragraph 141 onwards) largely repeats what is written in the police’s final report—claims about digital coordination, planning, mobilisation, and location records—but does not actually examine the reliability or relevance of the material behind these claims. We are told what the police allege but not shown how those allegations are supported.

At the same time, the court ignores key facts that complicate this narrative. It relies on Imam’s presence at Jamia without noting that the speech in question is already part of two separate cases: the first is under FIR 242/2019 registered at the Jamia Nagar Police Station, and the second is under FIR number 22/2020 registered at the Police Station-Crime Branch in which Section 13 of the UAPA has been invoked. In the cases relating to these FIRs, Imam has been granted bail; the court has ignored this important fact.

The judgment also overlooks the fact that Imam had distanced himself from the Shaheen Bagh protests, was not part of any organised civil society network, and did not share a common strategy with the other accused. In fact, he was arrested, under FIR 22/2020, more than a month before the riots took place in Delhi and was later chargesheeted in the “conspiracy” case through a supplementary charge sheet that was filed by the police only in December 2020.

The same pattern is perceptible in the court’s treatment of Khalid’s bail plea. The judgment relies heavily on his speeches and alleged participation in meetings but without closely examining what those speeches were about or what transpired in those meetings. Khalid delivered multiple speeches across the country in the months leading up to February 2020, but none of them referred to a “chakka jam”, and they did not lead to any FIRs or incidents of violence in those locations. Even the much-cited Amravati speech was not followed by any unrest. Despite these facts, the court treats his association with groups like the Delhi Protest Support Group and his presence in various meetings as evidence of a conspiracy without acknowledging that these were large, open forums with many participants and that Khalid was not their organiser.

Crucially, the judgment does not engage with facts that cut the other way. There is no discussion of what was actually said in these meetings or that Khalid and his associates had, at points, spoken against disruptive tactics like road blockades. Nor does it account for indications that he was in communication with the police and seen by them as someone who could help de-escalate protests. Key claims also rest on delayed witness statements, without clear digital evidence to support them.

There is, similarly, no explanation of how the alleged conspirators could have planned anything around the visit of a foreign dignitary before it was publicly announced. Khalid’s cooperation during months of investigation and his conduct while on interim bail are also brushed aside. By leaving out these details, the judgment presents a one-sided story. Disparate and often inconclusive elements are stitched together into a narrative of conspiracy without clearly demonstrating how they translate into involvement in violence.

Second problem: No engagement with broader context

The second problem with the judgment is that it fails to engage with the broader context and competing factual narratives of the violence. It overlooks significant aspects of the record, including contemporaneous petitions seeking action against hate speech and judicial interventions such as the order passed by Justice S. Muralidhar, which directed the police to examine inflammatory speeches by political leaders. This significant omission reflects a selective engagement with the evidentiary landscape, privileging material that supports the prosecution’s theory while disregarding material that may complicate or contradict it.

The court does not analyse the scope, direction, or integrity of the police’s investigation in FIR 59/2020, including the evident asymmetry in the lines of inquiry pursued by the Special Cell. In particular, there is no judicial scrutiny of why certain allegations of incitement were foregrounded while others were either excluded or insufficiently investigated. By failing to ask where the rest of the material is, the court effectively accepts a partial and curated account as a complete one.

Furthermore, most of those killed in the violence were Muslims. Islamic places of worship were vandalised. The loot and destruction—of properties and vehicles—displaced hundreds of people and made them fearful of returning home, and most of these displaced people were Muslims. The decontextualised judgment fails to take all this into account while accepting the “conspiracy” theory.

The Delhi Police claimed that the North-East Delhi violence was part of a “larger, pre-planned conspiracy” formed by anti-CAA protesters in order to defame the Narendra Modi government. The language of the charge sheets echoes this claim, as do the public statements and Twitter posts of BJP leaders. It is also similar to the language of “fact-finding” reports published by non-governmental collectives, the “Call for Justice” (2020) group and the “Group of Intellectuals and Academicians” (2020).

The reports published by these two groups drew a flimsy connection between the anti-Muslim violence and anti-CAA dissidents, a narrative that was, at the time, widely deemed to be misleading, fabricated, and containing a “torrent of misinformation”, as reported by Alt News. Yet, as the civil activist Harsh Mander observed, they were acknowledged by the Union Home Ministry and thus laid out a politically sanctioned blueprint for the police investigation that followed.

The prosecution’s case proceeds on the premise that Khalid and Imam operated in concert as part of a coordinated and premeditated design. However, the two of them are known to have occupied distinct, and at times antagonistic, ideological positions and publicly articulated critiques of each other’s methods and political strategies. The judgment takes no note of this. By failing to test the foundational elements of conspiracy, agreement, common intention, and coordinated execution, the court lowers the threshold for imputing criminal liability in collective political contexts. This results in the uncritical endorsement of a singular causal claim: that the riots were a direct consequence of anti-CAA protests.

Third problem: line between democratic mobilisation and terror blurred

The third and more troubling aspect of this order is conceptual: the judgment blurs the line between democratic mobilisation by civil society and terrorism. It adopts an expansive reading of Section 15 of the UAPA, saying that acts capable of “disrupting civil life” or “threatening the economic security” can fall within the statute’s conception of a terrorist act (paragraphs 84–88).

The charge sheet and lower courts’ narratives positioned Khalid at the heart of a purported conspiracy to enforce citywide blockades against the CAA/National Register of Citizens that eventually culminated in violence. The Supreme Court faithfully recounts these allegations: Khalid is “described in the FIR as the principal conspirator”, a propagator of alleged anti-national slogans who “agreed to utilise social media… for large-scale indoctrination and mobilisation of youth” to implement “Chakka Jam” protests (paragraph 197).

Yet, “disruption of civil life” and “economic security” are not objectively measurable thresholds and are, in fact, discursively produced categories shaped by the state’s narrative. Consequently, what constitutes a sufficient degree of disruption or threat becomes contingent on state interpretation, allowing ordinary political action to be reclassified as terrorism under Section 15.

Crucially, neither Khalid nor Imam is linked to any specific act of violence, arson, or property destruction. They were not even physically present at sites where violence erupted: Khalid was in Amravati and Imam in jail. Despite this absence of proximate involvement, the court treats leadership in protest organisation and articulation of dissent as sufficient grounds to sustain allegations of terrorism.

According to the prosecution’s version, a (selectively extracted) portion of the speech Imam made on December 13, 2019, allegedly triggered the violence in North-East Delhi more than two months later. By accepting this claim at face value, the court failed to consider other parts of Imam’s speeches that reflected his faith in the police and the democratic system rather than any intent to subvert them: he explicitly urged crowds to refrain from violence, discouraged anti-social elements, and called for allowing the police to handle any disturbances. While Imam’s speeches do indicate that he was critical of the historical discrimination against Muslims in India, such criticism cannot, in itself, be construed as material capable of inciting violence.

By invoking Section 15’s expansive language—acts committed “by any other means of whatever nature”—the court accepts that disruption of traffic and public services through protest blockades may amount to a terrorist act that threatens economic stability (paragraph 88). It claims that the planning and organising of mobilisation, chakka jams, and protest sit-ins like the one in Shaheen Bagh that blocked arterial routes are a form of “economic” terrorism that “disrupt[s] supplies or services essential to the life of the community… and threaten[s] the economic security of the nation”. Here again, “national security” operates as an elastic and narratively constructed category. The threat posed by such blockades is not demonstrated through concrete harm but inferred in the abstract, on the basis of their potential to disrupt.

That logic, however, is decisive for the court’s treatment of both Khalid and Imam, for acts that are often intrinsic to protest mobilisation. The court concludes that the statutory embargo on bail under Section 43D (5) of the UAPA applies to Khalid and Imam. This is precisely where the judgment’s constitutional anxiety begins to look backwards. It suggests that protest movements and democratic organising, which have long been part of South Asia’s anti-colonial political traditions, can become evidence of terror if the state frames them as strategically disruptive enough. That is a profound doctrinal shift that does not merely punish Khalid and Imam but risks criminalising organisation, persuasion, and mass political action when those acts are retrospectively folded into a conspiracy narrative.

Final problem: Guilty before being proven so?

The final problem of this judgment is evidentiary. The court repeatedly insists that it is not deciding on the guilt of the accused and that the questions about admissibility of the case, witness credibility, and the precise meaning of the speeches will be decided on during the trial. Yet, the practical effect of this judgment is to let untested allegations do the work of proof at the very stage where liberty is most vulnerable.

That is where Union of India v. K.A. Najeeb should have mattered more than it did. The Najeeb judgment held that special-statute bail restrictions do not oust the constitutional court’s power to grant bail where continued incarceration becomes inconsistent with Article 21 (guaranteeing “protection of life and personal liberty”). The court in Gulfisha Fatima acknowledges that principle but recasts delay as something that can usually be managed through expediting witness statements and trial rather than liberty.

The court’s summary (paragraphs 197–205) lists Khalid’s alleged participation in numerous meetings (Jangpura, December 8, 2019; Jamia, December 15, 2019; Shaheen Bagh, December 17, 2019, among others) creation of WhatsApp groups, and instructions to co-accused to block roads and allegedly “overthrow” the government (paragraph 199). On the basis of this narrative presented by the charge sheet, the court concluded that there was a prima facie case that Khalid was “not a peripheral sympathiser [but] an organiser and coordinator” whose actions linked disparate protest sites into a planned scheme (paragraph 211).

Khalid’s own submissions—that no violent act or arms were tied to him and he was not even in Delhi during the worst riots—are brushed aside by the court. His counsel pointed out that no witness had recorded seeing Khalid at a riot site, no weapons or funds were seized from him, and he did not send any violent messages (only innocuous protest logistics). The court dismissed these points, stating only that it must test whether “the prosecution material, taken as it stands… furnishes reasonable grounds for believing that the accusations… are prima facie true” (paragraph 209). In thus uncritically accepting the charge sheet narrative, the court effectively equated Khalid’s protest speeches and meetings with a covert conspiracy merely on the basis of hearsay and political will, simply because no exculpatory material contradicted the narrative.

The judgment, which repeatedly accepts untested allegations and protected witness statements, ignores three important points.

First, there was no independent material corroboration (such as CDR/location, chats, or any connection with Khalid) of the claims made by witness statements.

Second, there was a delay in recording the statements without a valid explanation by the police.

And third, in 2020, much before his arrest, Khalid himself wrote a letter to the Commissioner of Delhi Police, S.N. Shrivastava, stating that there was immense pressure on the witnesses to report against Khalid. His letter stated: “...they [the police] told him [witness] that he had to make a choice—he could either comply and go ahead with the pre-drafted statement [given by the police] without any deletions or he could sign the other form [arrest memo].”

One-sided review of facts

By basing the decision to refuse bail on one speech and ignoring the many other speeches he gave across the country, the court effectively conducted a one-sided review of acts that were placed in chronology but were not connected with the subsequent violence. It thus ignored the possibility that speeches and mass mobilisations involving chakka jams are non-violent civil disobedience movements.

In other words, the judgment does not reject constitutional liberty outright but domesticates it and robs it of teeth. The right to liberty survives only as a distant supervisory value, while the prosecution narrative is allowed to harden into sufficient grounds for continued detention. The result is a bail doctrine in which the accused must disprove a theory of conspiracy that has never been tested through trial.

The most important consequence of the judgment is not only what it says about Khalid and Imam but what it authorises in future cases of protests against government policies. The court’s final framing makes the difference between “conceiving” unlawful activity and “facilitating” it legally decisive, and it insists that those alleged to have directed a conspiracy stand on a different footing from local-level participants (pages 129 to 141). That may be doctrinally neat but gives investigators a powerful template to build a conspiracy around speech, meetings, chats, and protest logistics, then use the UAPA’s bail bar to keep the accused in jail while the case remains unresolved and far from trial.

On the broader civil liberties front, the judgment arguably empowers the state’s narrative in protest-related cases. By sanctioning the use of meetings, speeches, pamphlets, and digital group memberships as prima facie evidence of the case, but without determining “whether these allegations satisfy the ingredients of a terrorist act under Section 15” (paragraph 239), the court creates a template for interpreting dissent as suspect. In practice, security agencies may be emboldened to form conspiracy theories around activist networks, which is a concern for free expression and civil society at large. In the long run, this case may harden UAPA bail jurisprudence where delay will no longer be an automatic release ground as in Union of India v. K.A. Najeeb (2021/3 SCC 713).

Six years after the North-East Delhi violence, the tragedy no longer lies only in the riots and killings. It also lies in how easily opposition to the state’s policies can be rewritten as a national security threat, and how quickly pretrial detention can become the default outcome by the courts once that rewrite is accepted. The messaging of the judgment is stark: that in UAPA cases, once a conspiracy is alleged with enough detail, bail becomes the exception, not the rule.

Nidah Kaiser is a postdoctoral researcher at King’s College, London.

Tamanna Pankaj is a Delhi-based lawyer and represents a co-accused in the Delhi riots larger conspiracy case.

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