October 12 marks the second death anniversary of Professor G.N. Saibaba, a professor at Delhi University who was 90% physically disabled. He was arrested under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) in 2014, on allegations of having links with Maoists. Denied bail, he remained in prison until a trial court convicted him in 2017 and sentenced him to life imprisonment — a judgment that this writer, in the pages of this newspaper, criticised at the time as being based entirely on guilt by association and insinuation.
Saibaba.
By then, Professor Saibaba had spent a decade in prison, much of it in solitary confinement. In prison, his health had further deteriorated, and soon after his release, he passed away. The anniversary of Professor Saibaba’s death is an occasion to reflect on a legal regime that is designed to — quite literally — imprison dissent and deny justice. Over the years, the UAPA has been used to criminalise political opposition. Eight years later, the trial has yet to begin, and the court has yet to frame charges against the accused. The list of people who have spent years in jail under UAPA thus spans the length and breadth of the country: it also includes Soni Sori, the Adivasi leader who was allegedly tortured while in prison and eventually acquitted of all charges, Akhil Gogoi — the Assamese anti-CAA activist — and Siddique Kappan, the Kerala journalist who was arrested while traveling to Uttar Pradesh to cover the Hathras gangrape case, and spent two years in jail before eventually being granted bail by the Supreme Court. Once that is done, the UAPA then makes the grant of bail extremely hard, by requiring the judge to deny bail if, on a reading of the police chargesheet, a prima facie case appears to be made out. This inconsistency makes the grant of bail under the UAPA extremely judge-centric.
Vindication eventually arrived in 2024, when the Bombay High Court acquitted him of all charges. Following the violence at the Bhima Koregaon commemoration event in 2018, UAPA charges were brought against 16 scholars and activists, all of whom were jailed. In a third example, Khurram Parvez, a Kashmiri activist and the coordinator of the Jammu and Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS), was arrested under the UAPA in 2021 on allegations of terror financing and promoting secessionism. On March 20, 2023, a journalist, Irfan Mehraj, was also arrested and imprisoned in the case. The two were eventually granted bail in July 2026, after Parvez had spent five years in prison without trial.
Here again, courts have not helped: while one set of judges has accorded a degree of strict scrutiny to police chargesheets, another set has adopted an “eyes wide shut” approach that grants excessive deference to the police version. Along with this, courts have also been inconsistent on the consequences of delay: the Supreme Court, for example, did not seem to think that five years in prison without trial was “excessive” delay when denying bail to Imam and Khalid, while other courts have held that five years does constitute excessive delay (for example, in the Khurram Parvez case).
One after another, 14 of the remaining accused were granted bail, but only after spending years in prison without trial. It was only in early 2026, after more than five years in jail, that five of the seven appellants were granted bail by the Supreme Court. Meanwhile, Father Stan Swamy died in custody after his health deteriorated. Their bail conditions remain draconian and restrictive, imposing multiple reporting conditions, restricting travel and severely constraining their lives. The 16th prisoner, lawyer Surendra Gadling, was also granted bail in the case but remained in prison in connection with another case. many students and scholars remained in jail for years, with their bail applications denied at all levels of the judiciary While a few of these individuals were granted bail soon after.
However, the Supreme Court denied bail to the remaining two — Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid — on the basis that they were “intellectual architects.”
