Activist Umar Khalid has approached the Supreme Court challenging a Delhi High Court order that rejected his bail plea in a case related to the 2020 Delhi riots, according to a report by Live Law on Wednesday.
On September 2, a bench of Justices Navin Chawla and Shalinder Kaur of the High Court dismissed the bail petitions of Khalid and seven others – Gulfisha Fatima, Sharjeel Imam, Mohd Saleem Khan, Shifa Ur Rehman, Athar Khan, Meeran Haider, and Abdul Khalid Saifi. A separate bench of Justices Subramonium Prasad and Harish Vaidyanathan Shankar also denied bail to another accused, Tasleem Ahmed.
The nine accused have been in jail for over five years. Fatima and Imam have also moved the Supreme Court against the High Court’s order earlier this month.
The riots in Delhi in 2020 claimed 53 lives and left hundreds injured, most of them Muslims. Delhi Police have alleged that the violence was the result of a “larger conspiracy” aimed at defaming the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, accusing those who led protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act of being behind it.
Police alleged that Khalid helped form the Delhi Protest Support Group on WhatsApp and mentored a group called “Muslim Students of JNU” with Sharjeel Imam to incite violence. In a chargesheet filed in November 2020, they claimed Khalid had “remotely controlled” the riots and even held a “secret meeting” to plan them.
Khalid’s lawyer, however, argued that the allegations were baseless. “Merely being on a group is not any indication of anything wrong. In this case, I have not even said anything,” he told the court, adding that Khalid only shared the location of a protest site when asked. “If someone chooses to inform me, it is not attributable to me. Anyway, there was no criminality in the message,” he said.
The defence also stressed that the bail pleas were filed because of the prolonged delay in the trial.
