Umar Khalid in jail for 766 days; HC rejects his bail plea in UAPA case

In a case involving the alleged plot behind the Delhi riots in February 2020, the Delhi High Court on Tuesday denied former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) student leader Umar Khalid’s plea for bail.

In September 2020, Khalid was arrested and charged under the draconian anti-terror law known as the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) as well as the Indian Penal Code. Based on his speech at Amravati, Maharashtra, the Delhi Police accused him of being one of the “masterminds” behind the riots.

Khalid has been imprisoned for 799 days as of today.

He filed a petition with the high court in April after his bail request was denied by a trial court a month earlier.He argued he had nothing to do with the violence in northeast Delhi and had no conspiratorial connect with the other accused in the case.

When deciding whether to grant Khalid’s plea for bail on September 9, a bench of justices Siddharth Mridul and Rajnish Bhatnagar denied it, stating that they did not think it had any merit.

Khalid’s representative, senior counsel Trideep Pais, stated that Khalid’s Amravati address explicitly called for nonviolence and did not incite violence anywhere.

He claimed that the speech is the sole overt action attributed to Khalid. “That was an open gathering. Nowhere there was any violence as a result, Pais told the court.

The Delhi Police opposed the bail plea, claiming that Khalid’s statements were intended to scare Muslims.