As of February 2024, his plea before the top court has been adjourned 14 times in 11 months.
Four years after the Delhi police said student activist Umar Khalid was a key conspirator in the February 2020 north-east Delhi riots, he is languishing inside a maximum security prison in Tihar Jail without trial or bail. Delhi Police’s special cell arrested the former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) on September 14, 2020, for his alleged role in the riots that left 53 people, mostly Muslims, dead.
Four years after the Delhi police said student activist Umar Khalid was a key conspirator in the February 2020 north-east Delhi riots, he is languishing inside a maximum security prison in Tihar Jail without trial or bail. Delhi Police’s special cell arrested the former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) on September 14, 2020, for his alleged role in the riots that left 53 people, mostly Muslims, dead.
Editorial | Demonising protests: On the Umar Khalid case
In four years, Mr. Khalid has approached multiple courts, seeking bail, which the Supreme Court on several occasions has held as a ‘rule’ even applicable to offences under special statutes like the UAPA. The 36-year-old, who pleaded not guilty for the crime he was accused of, says he only took part in a peaceful protest.
Larger conspiracy case
In the aftermath of the riots, Delhi Police arrested over 2,500 people in different cases within months. In four years of hearings and trials, the lower courts have given bail to over 2,000 people and reprimanded the police on most occasions for its “shoddy” investigation. Among the cases related to the 2020 riots, one is the larger conspiracy case in which the police made Mr. Khalid an accused along with 17 others, many of whom are out on bail.
He was denied bail for the first time by a Karkardooma court in March 2022, almost one and a half years after his incarceration. He later approached the Delhi High Court, which too denied any relief to him in October 2022. Following this, Mr. Khalid filed a bail plea in the Supreme Court.
As of February 2024, his plea before the top court has been adjourned 14 times in 11 months.
The adjournments happened sometimes because the lawyers from either side remained absent, or on the prosecution’s request. In August 2023, a Bench of Justices A.S. Bopanna and P.K. Mishra adjourned Mr. Khalid’s bail hearing as it “couldn’t be taken up in this combination [of judges]”.
The case was then transferred to a Bench led by Justice Bela M. Trivedi that on September 5, 2023 adjourned the hearing on the request of Mr. Khalid’s lawyer. On the next occasion, on October 12, the Bench adjourned the matter when it came up for hearing, citing “paucity of time”. The bail plea was again adjourned in November due to “non-availability of the senior lawyers concerned”, and twice in January 2024 for different reasons…
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