In Denying Bail to Umar Khalid, Delhi High Court Sees Trial Delay of Five Years as 'Natural Pace'; EC’s Partisanship Gives INDIA Bloc Its Biggest Rallying Cry Yet

Why didn't S Jaishankar go to China and Japan with Prime Minister Modi?

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Snapshot of the day

September 2, 2025

Siddharth Varadarajan

Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam and several other Muslim civil liberties activists have been in jail for five years and their trial in the 2020 Riots Conspiracy Case the Delhi Police cooked up has yet to begin but the Delhi High Court today denied them bail on the grounds that the “case involves complex issues, and the trial is progressing at a natural pace.”

Remember what the Solicitor General of India, Tushar Mehta, who appeared for the Delhi Police, had told the court? “If you are doing something against the nation, then you better be in jail till you are acquitted or convicted,” he said.

By describing the failure to start trial five years after the filing of a chargesheet as the ‘natural pace’ of progress, Justices Navin Chawla and Shalinder Kaur’s bail verdict means the state can continue to incarcerate the activists indefinitely.

The other activists denied bail today are Mohd Saleem Khan, Shifa Ur Rehman, Athar Khan, Meeran Haider, Abdul Khalid Saifi and Gulfisha Fatima. All of them were involved in the peaceful protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and were arrested between March and September 2020. The police deliberately ignored all evidence pointing to the involvement of Hindutva extremists and Bharatiya Janata Party leaders in the riots which shook north-east Delhi in February 2020 and led to the death of 59 people, two-thirds of whom were Muslims, and the destruction of predominantly Muslim homes, shops and places of worship.

The activists’ time in jail has been marked by multiple appeals and subsequent postponements and rejections by courts, in what rights defenders worldwide have decried as a travesty of justice. On the same day, a separate bench of the Delhi High Court, comprising Justice Subramonium Prasad and Justice Harish Vaidyanathan Shankar also denied bail to co-accused Tasleem Ahmed.

Legal scholar Gautam Bhatia has parsed the order denying bail to Khalid and others and noted the complete absence of legal reasoning. He cites this passage from the order:

Appellant Umar Khalid also delivered speeches in Amravati on 17.02.2020, urging protests on 24.02.2020, which coincided with the State visit of the President of the USA, which is alleged by the prosecution to have deliberately been timed to cause violent riots on 23/24.02.2020 to garner international attention. The above role, as assigned by the prosecution to the Appellants, cannot be lightly brushed aside.

Bhatia notes that the court makes no attempt to examine or analyse what Khalid had actually said in his Amravati speech. “Paraphrasing the High Court’s judgment,” he writes: “A man said something. Violence happened. The Prosecution says this is evidence of a conspiracy. Therefore it must be so.”

Had the judges actually engaged with what Khalid said at Amravati, it would have been obvious that the Delhi Police’s claims were false.

The dismissal of bail pleas is yet another reminder about the “rot in the