This is after two major student activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam in India were turned out on bail after spending over five years in prison without facing trial.
On Monday, the Supreme Court in India dismissed the applications of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, who had been arrested following the Delhi riots of 2020.
They were accused by the police of plotting to cause lethal conflicts in the capital killing 53 people, mostly Muslims. They were subjected to stringent anti-terror laws that explain why it is hard to bail them. They refused to accept the accusations and attempted to get their bail denied in years without success in the courts.
Five other activists who were also in the same case were also arrested but were given bail by the court.
The riots transpirated as months-long protests over a citizenship law according to which the United Nations have termed as being fundamentally discriminatory.
In its Monday morning order, the two-judge court determined that the bail of the seven accused on Monday morning would have to be considered individually because the accuseds were not equal before the law as far as culpability was concerned as reported by legal website Bar and Bench.
The judges claimed that they were drawing a distinction between the cases leveled against Khalid and Imam and those cases against the other defendants when they denied them bail.
The court further stated that the petitioners were not entitled to a bail once more until one year had passed.
In 2019, Khalid graduated with a PhD received at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. At the time when Imam was arrested in the same university, he was a doctoral scholar. Both men are 37.
The plight of the incarcerated activists has received significant publicity in India and the rest of the world.
In October 2022 as part of the riots, a retired Supreme Court judge and three retired high court judges together with a former secretary of the federal home, in a report, established that they were not able to find any substantiating evidence that would justify imposing terrorism charges on the activists.
Less than a week ago, a faction of Congressmen and Senators in the US wrote a letter to the ambassador of the Indians in Washington explaining that they remained concerned about the sustained altruistic detention of the activists.
The activists have so far failed to secure bail because they are accused of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA)- a tough law on anti-terror and one that makes it exceptionally difficult to secure bail and thus, end up serving years of detention pending the completion of the trial.
Khalid has had his pleas of bail denied at least 5 occasions in various courts across the last five years. This was with two brief outings in 2024 and 2025 where he traveled to attend weddings within his family. Imam has pleaded bail at least twice, which was refused.
The five activists who have been given bail on Monday are Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Mohd Samir Khan, Shadab Ahmed and Shifa ur Rehman.
Ms Fatima, 32, is a graduate in business administration at the Delhi University and the other ones are human rights activists and they opposed the Citizenship Amendment Act.
On September 2025, Khalid and Imam, along with others, had moved to the Supreme Court after the high court of Delhi had rejected their bid to remain on bail.
The activists informed the court that they were in jail over five years and, to date, there was no piece of evidence to support that they were involved in the violence since their continued stay in prison was tantamount to being punished without any trial.
Umar Khalid: Indian activist languishes in jail without bail or trial
Upon being interviewed in January 2020, Umar Khalid described himself as a 32-year-old Indian with a doctorate in indigenous people at a highly educational college, which stated that he is unemployed.
Ideologically speaking, one might say that I am a radical democrat. I think that I believe in democracy, and the democracy that is not restricted up to the moment you vote, Mr Khalid said to VICE Asia.
It has to become a reality in your day to day lives in a manner that you can express your problems and concerns with how democracy functions.
Mr Khalid had become well-known in 2016 when he was among five Indian students accused of sedition due to planning a protest at his university alma matter, the Delhi-based Jawaharlal Nehru University, over the hanging of a Kashmiri man in 2013.
He together with another pupil had surrendered to the police and were given bail several months afterwards. In 2022, the law was provisionally frozen by the Supreme Court and the government ordered all investigations to be put on hiatus until the court was able to definitively rule on the legality of the law.
In September 2020, four years later, Mr Khalid was again arrested and charged with being a chief planner in violent confrontations in Delhi that killed 53 people, the majority of them Muslims. Indian riots in February 2020 took place during months-long demonstrations against a controversial law on citizenship.
The activist has been living in the city languishing in a maximum security prison since then. Mr Khalid one of the number of students and activists detained over the violence has refuted the allegations. The 36-year-old claims that he had participated in a peaceful demonstration.
Mr Khalid was charged with two cases of the police. In one of the cases, he has been dropped, and in the other a charge has yet to be brought against him in court, and the trial is yet to commence. The second case, denied bail twice, he has undergone extended incarceration after the police used the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) – a tough anti-terror statute whose use has long been infamous in making it extremely difficult to secure bail to spend several years in jail until trial.
Why Supreme Court Granted Bail To 5 But Not Umar Khalid And Sharjeel Imam
In the case about the conspiracy in the year 2020, regarding the Delhi riots, student activists Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid have been refused bail by the Supreme Court. As he read out the verdict, the Supreme Court said that it cannot treat all the people equally when it comes to bail.
The Supreme Court released on bail five individuals who were found in the case Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa Ur Rehman, Mohd Saleem Khan, and Shadab Ahmed under conditions.
The record reveals that the culpability of all the appellants is not equal. The participatory hierarchy means that the court has to evaluate one of the applications separately. The Supreme Court stated that article 21 stipulated that the state must provide a purpose of extended pre-trial custody.
The Supreme Court also pointed out that the two cannot be accorded the advantage of the time lag in the trial.
The Delhi High Court order which refused Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid bail on a case filed under the tough law of Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, (UAPA), the charge on a larger conspiracy that allegedly led to the 2020 riots in Delhi, had been contested by Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid.
The Delhi Police have repeatedly objected the bail requests on Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid, reporting that the crimes committed by them were connected with an intent to destabilise the state, and thus can not be called as spur-of-the-moment demonstrations. The police have said that they organized a highly organized, so-called pan-India conspiracy with the aim to change regime and strangle the economy.
In September, Umar Khalid protested the venueing of charges in the 2020 Delhi riots case of larger conspiracy and informed a Delhi court that he has already spent five years in jail on this so-called conspiracy joke. He claimed that there was fabrication of evidence to point him out as guilty.
Khalid made allegations that the prosecution decides to implicate an individual first and hence attacks him, by creating documents and returning the prosecution sheet.
There will be first a decision to be made along the lines of: isko pakadna hai’ (this person has to be caught)… and then a reverse engineering will follow, as the senior advocate Trideep Pais of Khalid advised.
It has no connections (with the real crimes) and is miles out of reach of the recuperation, he supplemented.
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