Why the UAPA requires urgent reform

October 12 marks the second death anniversary of Professor GN Saibaba. Saibaba, a professor at Delhi University who was 90% physically disabled. In 2014, he was arrested under the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA) on charges of having links with the Maoists. Denied bail, he remained in prison until a trial court convicted him in 2017 and sentenced him to life in prison – a sentence which this writer in the pages of this newspaper at the time criticized as based solely on guilt by association and innuendo.

Vindication finally came in 2024 when the Bombay High Court acquitted him of all charges. Professor Saibaba had by then spent ten years in prison, most of it in solitary confinement. His health continued to deteriorate in prison and he died soon after his release.

A law that punishes dissent

The anniversary of Professor Saibaba’s death is an occasion to reflect on a legal regime designed to – literally – imprison dissent and deny justice. Over the years, the UAPA has been used to criminalize political opposition. Following the violence at the Bhima Koregaon memorial in 2018, UAPA charges were brought against 16 scientists and activists, all of whom were jailed. Eight years later, the trial has yet to begin and the court has yet to indict the defendants.

Meanwhile, Stan Swamy’s father died in custody after his health deteriorated. One by one, 14 of the remaining accused were released on 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 curtailing their lives. A sixteenth inmate, lawyer Surendra Gadling, was also released on bail in the case but remained in jail in connection with another case.

Similarly, after the 2020 Delhi riots, UAPA charges were leveled against many student leaders, scholars and activists accusing them of participating in or masterminding the riots. Remarkably, there was no direct evidence against any of these people, only vague accusations of conspiracy and of being the “intellectual masterminds” of the riots.

While several of these individuals were released on bail soon after, many students and scholars remained in prison for years, with their bail applications rejected at all levels of the judiciary. It was only in early 2026, after more than five years in prison, 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 grounds that they were “intellectual architects”.

The term “intellectual architect” is unknown to the law and rests entirely on assumptions and conjectures. The court also took the unusual step of effectively barring Imam and Khalid from applying for bail for a year. It is now more than six years – almost 10% of the average human life – in prison without trial. Meanwhile, Khalid publishes a book from prison, while Imam continues to work on his PhD, despite considerable difficulties in accessing research materials.

In a third example, Khurram Parvez, a Kashmiri activist and coordinator of the Jammu and Kashmir Civil Society Coalition (JKCCS), was arrested under the UAPA in 2021 on charges of financing terrorism and supporting secessionism. On 20 March 2023, journalist Irfan Mehraj was also arrested and jailed in the case. Both were eventually released on bail in July 2026 after Parvez spent five years in prison without trial.

The list of people who have spent years in prison under the UAPA thus spans the length and breadth of the country: it also includes Soni Sori, an Adivasi leader who was allegedly tortured in prison and eventually acquitted of all charges, Akhil Gogoi – an Assamese anti-CAA activist – and Siddique Kappan, a Hatdesh gang journalist from Hatdesh U who was arrested while traveling to the UAP. and spent two years in jail before the Supreme Court finally granted him bail.

There are also many other nameless people on the list who don’t have the same level of public profile but have spent months and years of their lives in prison under a law that defines offenses in the most magical terms and then makes bail virtually impossible.

Unclear definitions

For example, the UAPA criminalizes “membership” of illegal organizations without clarifying what the word “membership” means. It has a similar set of provisions that are broadly and vaguely worded and susceptible to various interpretations – including, at their extreme, mere sloganeering or ownership of literature.

The courts didn’t help. 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 canceled by the Supreme Court. In 2011, the court limited the term “membership” to “active membership”, which was instead defined as “incitement to violence”. But in 2023, the Supreme Court, acting within its “revisional jurisdiction” — which is only to correct “errors in the record” — overturned that ruling.

Similarly, in the judgment on anticipatory bail in the Delhi riots cases, the Delhi High Court conducted an extensive analysis of the “terrorism” clauses of the UAPA and gave them a specific, specific interpretation to prevent broad discretion in their application. On appeal, however, the Supreme Court ruled that the judgment “shall not be considered precedential,” rendering it effectively worthless as a statement of law. The terms of the UAPA thus remain extremely broad and undefined, allowing state authorities to bring almost any conduct within its purview by merely tying it to terrorism or illegal activity.

Obstacles to bail

Once that happens, the UAPA then makes it extremely difficult to grant bail by requiring a judge to deny bail if there appears to be a prima facie case based on the police criminal record. Here, too, the courts have not helped: while one group of judges has accorded a degree of strict scrutiny to police allegations, another group has adopted an “eyes out” approach that gives too much credit to the police version. This inconsistency makes the granting of bail under the UAPA extremely judge-centric. Along with this, the courts have also been divided on the consequences of delay: for example, the Supreme Court did not seem to think that five years in prison without trial was an “excessive” delay in denying bail to Imam and Khalid, while other courts have held that five years did constitute an unreasonable delay (for example, in the Khurram Parvez case).

All of this leads to a state of affairs that is antithetical to the rule of law and against any legal system worth the name: a vague law with severe penalties that continues to be interpreted in a way that expands rather than contains state discretion, resulting in years of imprisonment without trial. The death anniversary of Professor Saibaba, one of the worst victims of this system, reminds us once again that there is an urgent need to rethink and reset this system.

(Gautam Bhatia is a lawyer based in Delhi)