The Delhi Police on Thursday strongly resisted the bail requests of student activists Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam and three other student activists who are accused in the conspiracy case of the Northeast Delhi riots in 2020 of violation of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). The police argued in an elaborate 177-page affidavit to the Supreme Court that the crimes were a deliberate and premeditated operation toward destabilising the state, thus should not come with bail, but jail.
The affidavit holds that the violence in February 2020 was not a spontaneous response to demonstrations against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), but a well-planned operation of regime change that was carried out under the banner of civil dissent. The police claimed that the accused had a conspiracy to set off the communal tensions in the visit of the then-US President Donald Trump, and the goal was to internationalise unrest which would reflect the Indian government as a discriminating one.
The police filing came just after the Supreme Court bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and NV Anjaria requested the authorities to take into consideration the long time detention of the accused people may of which several are serving close to five years in custody without any tangible results registered in the trial. The bench had commented, see whether you can think of anything five years are already gone, meaning that they were worried about the pre-trial detention taking such a long time.
According to the UAPA, courts may impose bail in case of a prima facie demonstration that the accusations do not mean that they are implicated in terror activity. The Delhi Police claimed that it had not achieved the required threshold based on pieces of evidence like encrypted messages, eyewitness accounts, and computer documentation of a vast conspiracy across states.
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