Delhi Court Refuses Bail To Umar Khalid & Sharjeel Imam in Larger Delhi Riots Conspiracy Case
(By Syed Ali Taher Abedi)
A court that acknowledges it has no choice. A Supreme Court judgment that another bench of the very same court has publicly doubted.
A trial in which arguments on charge remain incomplete after nearly six years of incarceration. And two accused persons who now await the verdict of a larger bench on the very principles that have kept them in custody even as the trial court, its hands constitutionally tied by an apex court embargo, had no option but to dismiss their bail applications on Saturday as not maintainable.
The case of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam has become, in the most uncomfortable institutional sense, a mirror held up to the tensions within India’s own supreme judicial authority.
New Delhi, July 4, 2026-Additional Sessions Judge Sameer Bajpai of the Karkardooma Sessions Court, Delhi, passed the dismissal order on Saturday, July 4, 2026, rejecting fresh bail applications filed by Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam two of the most prominent accused in the Delhi riots conspiracy case registered under the stringent Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967.
The Sessions Court’s dismissal was not a judgment on the merits of the bail applications. It was, in the most precise legal sense, a declaration of jurisdictional incapacity a court acknowledging, with admirable institutional honesty, that it was bound by a superior court’s order that had specifically and expressly circumscribed its authority to entertain precisely the applications now before it.
The court stated: “Importantly, this Court has no option but to follow the judgment dated 05.01.2026, as passed by the Hon’ble Supreme Court, whereby the petitions of both the applicants were dismissed.”
The court elaborated upon the terms of that restraint with equal precision “In the said judgment, the Hon’ble Supreme Court, while dismissing the pleas of the applicants, opined that only on the completion of the examination of the protected witnesses as relied upon by the prosecution, or upon the expiry of a period of one year from the date of said order, whichever is earlier, the applicants would be at liberty to renew their prayer for grant of bail before the jurisdictional Court.
Thus, following the said order of the Hon’ble Supreme Court, this Court cannot entertain the applications and grant bail to the applicants.”
The court concluded with the words that have now become the definitive judicial punctuation on this latest chapter of a prolonged and deeply contested legal saga “In fact the applications are not maintainable and they are hereby dismissed.”
The Accused: Five Years and Nine Months, and a Trial Still Incomplete
Umar Khalid former student activist and PhD scholar from Jawaharlal Nehru University has been in custody since September 14, 2020. Sharjeel Imam activist, historian, and doctoral researcher has been incarcerated since January 28, 2020.
Between them, they have spent, at the time of Saturday’s order, a combined period of approximately eleven years behind bars without a single day of trial on the merits of the charges against them having been completed.
Both are charged under the UAPA the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in what the Delhi Police has framed as a larger conspiracy to instigate and coordinate the communal violence that tore through parts of north-east Delhi in February 2020, resulting in the deaths of over fifty people and the displacement of many more.
The prosecution’s case rests, among other material, on the testimony of protected witnesses whose identities are shielded from the accused witnesses whose examination the Supreme Court had, in its January 2026 order, identified as the primary trigger condition for the lifting of the bail embargo.
The fresh bail applications placed before the Sessions Court highlighted a stark reality despite the passage of more than six months since the Supreme Court’s January 2026 judgment, there has been no meaningful progress in the trial proceedings, with arguments on charge the procedural stage at which the court frames the specific charges to be tried remaining incomplete.
In terms of the criminal trial timeline, the case has not yet crossed the threshold of charge framing, let alone commenced the examination of witnesses.
The protected witnesses whose examination the Supreme Court identified as the benchmark for future bail consideration have not been examined. The one-year period from the January 2026 order has not yet elapsed.
The accused are caught in the geometric trap of both conditions remaining unfulfilled simultaneously.
The Legal Context: The Andrabi Case and a Court That Doubts Its Own Judgment
The most constitutionally significant aspect of the present proceedings is not the Sessions Court’s dismissal which was, on the binding force of the Supreme Court’s January 2026 order, legally inevitable but the institutional background against which the fresh applications were filed.
Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam moved the Sessions Court for bail after a Supreme Court bench recently questioned the denial of bail to the duo in January 2026 by another bench of the apex court expressing doubt about the correctness of a judgment delivered by a coordinate bench of the Supreme Court itself.
This is a constitutional development of extraordinary significance. A bench of the Supreme Court of India publicly expressing doubt about the correctness of a judgment of a coordinate bench of the same court in the very case arising from that judgment is a phenomenon that occurs rarely in Indian constitutional jurisprudence and signals a serious disagreement within the apex court about the principles governing bail under the UAPA.
In the matter of Andrabi a case in which the Supreme Court revisited and questioned the rationale for denying bail to accused persons in UAPA matters a bench of the apex court articulated the foundational principle that bail is the rule and jail is the exception, even in cases registered under the UAPA.
That articulation was read by the applicants’ counsel as directly undermining the legal reasoning that had sustained the January 2026 order denying bail to Khalid and Imam.
It was on this basis that the Andrabi ruling had effectively eroded the foundations of the January 2026 order that Senior Advocate Trideep Pais, appearing for Umar Khalid, argued that Khalid was entitled to bail notwithstanding the earlier rejection.
Senior Advocate Pais further argued that the one-year embargo imposed by the January 2026 order the direction that Khalid and Imam could not seek bail for one year or until the protected witnesses were examined could not be sustained in the altered legal landscape created by the Andrabi decision.
The Larger Bench: A Reference That Changes the Legal Landscape
The argument advanced by Advocate Talib Mustafa, appearing for Sharjeel Imam, added a further layer of constitutional complexity. He submitted that whether such a one-year embargo on filing bail applications can be lawfully imposed under the UAPA framework a question that goes to the fundamental rights of an accused person to seek liberty from the court before which the case is pending is itself a question that has been referred to a larger bench of the Supreme Court.
This reference is of profound importance. If the larger bench, when it takes up the matter, holds that the imposition of a time-bound embargo on bail applications in UAPA cases is constitutionally impermissible as an infringement of the right to apply for bail that the Code of Criminal Procedure and the Constitution independently preserve for every accused person the foundations of the January 2026 order will be further eroded.
Some other accused persons in the same case have already received the benefit of the reference to the larger bench, with their applications being deferred pending the outcome of that constitutional examination.
Khalid and Imam now await the same constitutional answer but from behind prison walls in which they have spent, in Imam’s case, more than six and a half years.
The State’s Position: Clarity Must Come from the Supreme Court
Counsel appearing for the Delhi Police placed before the Sessions Court a submission of strict legal correctness whose constitutional implications are nonetheless uncomfortable that until the larger bench delivers its ruling, the findings, directions, and embargo contained in the Supreme Court’s January 2026 judgment remain binding on the Sessions Court, on the parties, and on the proceedings.
The State submitted “If they are aggrieved, if they have any issue, they could have very well approached the SC and sought clarifications. The appropriate forum was the Hon’ble Supreme Court. Once the SC passed the judgment, this court cannot…”
The submission is unimpeachable as a statement of the doctrine of precedent and the hierarchical structure of India’s judicial system.
A Sessions Court cannot decline to follow a Supreme Court judgment on the ground that another bench of the Supreme Court has expressed doubts about its correctness. The correction of a Supreme Court judgment, if correction is warranted, must come from the Supreme Court itself — from the larger bench whose reference has already been ordered, and whose ruling is now awaited.
The UAPA Framework: A Statutory Architecture That Tips the Scales
The continued incarceration of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam without trial must be understood against the backdrop of the statutory framework that governs bail in UAPA cases a framework that the Supreme Court’s Andrabi decision has now placed under constitutional scrutiny.
Section 43D (5) of the UAPA provides that no person accused of an offence under the Act shall be released on bail if the court, on a perusal of the case diary or the report made under Section 173 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, is of the opinion that there are reasonable grounds for believing that the accusation against the person is prima facie true.
This is a reverse standard one that requires the accused to demonstrate not merely that bail conditions can be imposed, but that the prosecution’s case does not appear prima facie true on the face of the record.
It is a standard that courts have found particularly difficult to navigate in complex conspiracy cases where the prosecution’s material is voluminous, the allegations are grave, and the evidence is contested and it is a standard that has resulted, across multiple high-profile UAPA prosecutions, in the prolonged pre-trial incarceration of accused persons who have neither been convicted nor acquitted.
The Andrabi decision’s reassertion of the principle that bail is the rule and jail the exception even under UAPA represents a judicial pushback against the institutional tendency to treat pre-trial incarceration as the default in anti-terror cases.
Whether that pushback will ultimately extend to the specific circumstances of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam is the question that the larger bench must now answer.
The Human Arithmetic of Prolonged Incarceration
Behind the legal arguments about embargo conditions, larger bench references, and statutory bail standards lies a human reality whose constitutional weight increases with every passing month.
Umar Khalid has now spent nearly six years in custody years that would, under any ordinary trajectory, have been the most professionally productive of his life as a researcher, thinker, and public intellectual. Sharjeel Imam has now spent more than six and a half years in custody a period that exceeds the sentence that might be imposed for many offences of considerably greater immediate physical harm than the speech-related allegations that form a significant part of the case against him.
The Supreme Court has itself acknowledged, through its public questioning of the January 2026 judgment in the context of the Andrabi decision, that the legal principles governing their continued incarceration are not beyond doubt.
A larger bench has been constituted to re-examine those principles.
The outcome of that constitutional re-examination will determine not merely whether Khalid and Imam receive bail, but whether the UAPA bail framework as currently applied with its reverse standard, its protection of prosecution witnesses from cross-examination while the accused remain in custody, and its effective tolerance of indefinite pre-trial detention in complex conspiracy cases is compatible with the foundational constitutional principle that a person is presumed innocent until proven guilty.
What Comes Next: The Larger Bench and the Road to Resolution
Saturday’s dismissal order by ASJ Sameer Bajpai closes one door and points unambiguously toward another.
The Sessions Court has correctly held that it has no jurisdiction to entertain bail applications in the face of the Supreme Court’s January 2026 embargo. That embargo and the constitutional question of whether it can lawfully be imposed is now squarely before the larger bench of the Supreme Court.
The larger bench’s ruling, when it arrives, will have consequences that extend far beyond the individual liberty of Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam.
It will determine the constitutional standards governing pre-trial detention in every case registered under the UAPA one of the most consequential and most contested pieces of legislation in India’s criminal statute book.
It will address whether a court of coordinate jurisdiction can review or effectively overrule a bail order passed by an equal bench. And it will decide whether the principle of bail as a rule and jail as an exception a principle that the Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed in ordinary criminal cases is one that survives the rigours of anti-terror legislation or is subordinated to them.
In the meantime, the Sessions Court has spoken. Khalid and Imam remain in custody. The larger bench awaits. And India’s constitutional jurisprudence on liberty, pre-trial detention, and the UAPA stands at a crossroads whose resolution will be among the most significant in the court’s recent history.
Case: State v. Umar Khalid and State v. Sharjeel Imam | Court: Karkardooma Sessions Court, Delhi | Presiding Judge: Additional Sessions Judge Sameer Bajpai | Date of Order: July 4, 2026 | Acts Invoked: Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967; Indian Penal Code; relevant provisions of the Arms Act | Counsel for Umar Khalid: Senior Advocate Trideep Pais with Advocates Sahil Ghai, Sanya Kumar, Sakshi Jain, Saloni Ambastha, and Loveleen Kukreja | Counsel for Sharjeel Imam: Advocate Talib Mustafa | Special Public Prosecutors for Delhi Police: Madhukar Pandey and Anirudh Mishra with Advocates Ayodhya Prasad, Sulabh Gupta, Saravjet Singh, Ishika Singh, and Ananya Bose | Period of incarceration: Umar Khalid — approximately 5 years 9 months; Sharjeel Imam — approximately 6 years 5 months | Supreme Court embargo order: January 5, 2026 | Larger bench reference: Pending
All accused persons are presumed innocent until proven guilty by a court of competent jurisdiction. The matter is sub judice.
