October 12 marks the second death anniversary of Professor G.N. Saibaba. 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.
Vindication eventually arrived in 2024, when the Bombay High Court acquitted him of all charges. 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.
A law that punishes dissent
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. 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. Eight years later, the trial has yet to begin, and the court has yet to frame charges against the accused.
Meanwhile, Father Stan Swamy died in custody after his health deteriorated. One after another, 14 of the remaining accused were granted bail, but only after spending years in prison without trial. 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.
Similarly, after the Delhi riots in 2020, UAPA charges were levelled against multiple student leaders, scholars, and activists, accusing them of participating in, or being the brains behind, the riots. Notably, there was no direct evidence against any of these people, only vague charges of conspiracy and of being the “intellectual architects” of the riots.
While a few of these individuals were granted bail soon after, many students and scholars remained in jail for years, with their bail applications denied at all levels of the judiciary. 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. However, the Supreme Court denied bail to the remaining two — Sharjeel Imam and Umar Khalid — on the basis that they were “intellectual architects.”
The term “intellectual architect” is unknown to law and rests entirely on surmises and conjectures. The court also took the unusual step of effectively preventing Imam and Khalid from applying for bail for a year. It has now been more than six years — almost 10% of an average human lifespan — of imprisonment without trial. In the meantime, Khalid has published a book from prison, while Imam continues to work on his PhD, despite significant difficulties in accessing research materials.
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.
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.
The list also includes many other nameless people who do not have the same degree of public prominence, but have spent months and years of their lives in prison, under a law that defines offences in the vaguest of terms, and then makes the grant of bail virtually impossible.
Vague definitions
The UAPA, for example, criminalises “membership” of unlawful organisations without clarifying what the word “membership” means. It has a similar host of provisions that carry broad and vague wording, and which are susceptible to multiple interpretations — including, at their extreme, mere sloganeering or possession of literature.
The courts have not helped. On two occasions, judges have attempted to bring precision and narrowness to the UAPA to prevent, or at least mitigate, some of its excesses. Both attempts were overturned by the Supreme Court. In 2011, a Bench of the court restricted the term “membership” to “active membership”, which in turn was defined to mean “incitement to violence.” However, in 2023, acting under its “review jurisdiction” — which is only meant to correct “errors on the face of the record” — the Supreme Court overturned this judgment.
Similarly, in an early bail judgment in the Delhi riots cases, the Delhi High Court undertook an extensive analysis of the UAPA’s “terrorism” clauses and gave them a specific, concrete interpretation to prevent wide discretion in their application. On appeal, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the judgment would “not be treated as precedent”, thus rendering it effectively worthless as a statement of law. Thus, the UAPA’s terms remain exceedingly broad and undefined, allowing State authorities wide leeway to bring almost any conduct within its scope by tenuously linking it to terrorism or unlawful activity.
The barriers to bail
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. 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. This inconsistency makes the grant of bail under the UAPA extremely judge-centric. 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).
All this leads to a state of affairs that is contrary to the rule of law and contrary to any legal system worth the name: a vague law with stringent punishments, that continues to be interpreted in a way that expands state discretion rather than contains it, and whose result then is long years of imprisonment without trial. The death anniversary of Professor Saibaba, one of the starkest victims of this system, reminds us yet again that an urgent rethink and reset of this system is necessary.
(Gautam Bhatia is a Delhi-based lawyer)