Personal liberty, in any democracy, is not a favour the government hands out to its citizens. It is a basic right that the state is charged to protect. The basic adage that a person is innocent until proven guilty is not a cliché but the very foundation of liberal constitutional values unless the threats are of an “extraordinary nature.” Similarly, the right to a fast and fair trial is not a mere technicality – it is a value which distinguishes a free liberal democracy from an authoritarian state. Precisely why Umar Khalid, a person incarcerated for six continuous years without a trial, must necessarily worry any individual in the country. This, however, is only one part of the story.
Liberty does not exist in a vacuum. It has to be actively protected from threats – from within and outside. A state also has a duty to protect liberty from organised violence and conspiracies that use the language of protest to spread chaos or instigate riots – a brutal reality underscored by the loss of civilian lives and officers like Intelligence Bureau staffer Ankit Sharma.
And so, harsh legislation like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) exists precisely to address such a phenomenon. The existence of such a law in itself is not conclusive evidence of a police state, but an assurance that no one capable of instigating mobs would roam free.
That every democracy, based on its realities and necessities, has some version of it primarily because ordinary criminal law is at times too weak to deal with planned, large-scale conspiracies. Of course, a tough law like UAPA can only be trusted if it is used carefully, only in demonstrably serious cases, under strict judicial scrutiny and with trials that move at a reasonable pace. This is precisely where a robust public discussion should matter, as that is what keeps government power in check.
But debate can only perform that job if people look at facts and the court record, instead of running on slogans and assumptions. Khalid’s case – an incarceration in the 2020 Delhi Riot larger conspiracy case for almost six years without a trial – is a classic reflection of this fault line.
This essay is not an attempt to identify whether he is guilty or innocent. That is for the courts to decide. This essay looks at an entirely different, though connected, issue of how the public conversation around his case has stopped being a debate about facts and turned into a tool for ideological point-scoring against the government of the day.
A large share of media commentary has turned ‘six years without trial’ into a simple narrative: the government controls the police and the courts – the trial has not happened – and therefore the government must be blamed. Beyond that, this simple narrative is then directed to characterise the state as an authoritarian state which jails a dissenter for six years without a trial. Indeed, an ostensibly neutral, truth-seeking online YouTube channel, The Deshbhakt, in one of its videos went a step forward and framed a question – rather insinuated an observation – as thus: “Terrorist or Prisoner of a Terror State?”
Around the same time, another portal, The Quint, ran a long feature reconstructing “a day in Umar Khalid’s life in jail,” taking the readers through his routine to convey the human cost of prolonged custody. Alongside these, Facebook Live sessions, WhatsApp forwards, Instagram reels and Twitter threads poured in to raise awareness about the case, each urging people to notice what six years in prison, without trial, actually means for one individual. This, obviously, is not the problem. In fact, it is necessary.
After all, a democracy needs its citizens to feel the weight of a case like this, not just read about it as a statistic. Awareness campaigns and emotional storytelling are legitimate and important tools of public discourse. They help make abstract constitutional questions feel real enough for people to care about.
That a society unmoved by six years of undertrial imprisonment is not a society we would want to live in, right?
But, at the same time, what cannot be ignored is the striking reality that across this entire wave of coverage, one thing is consistently and almost uniformly missing: any engagement with the Supreme Court’s judgment of 5 January 2026, in the connected bail appeals known as Gulfisha Fatima v. State (NCT of Delhi). This absence has two significant implications.
On one hand, it makes all this outpouring of concern incomplete. A moving account of suffering that never asks “what” the country’s highest court actually found on the issue and “why.” On the other hand, the consistency of the omission starts to look less like an oversight and more like a “conscious choice.”
That pattern is not just inadequate. It is suspicious.
This essay is therefore an attempt to address this gap and to bring the judgment itself into the discourse, and to offer, alongside the emotional and political accounts already in circulation, the missing factual account.
The Supreme Court judgment in question does not support the simple version being repeatedly sold over certain sections of media and social media. Firstly, of seven people who appealed together, the court granted bail to five — Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa Ur Rehman, Mohd. Saleem Khan, and Shadab Ahmed — and refused bail only to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam. In explaining its position, the apex court found that the material placed before it put Khalid and Imam in a category different from the others.
The court maintained it is:
satisfied that the prosecution material, taken at face value as required at this stage, discloses a prima facie attribution of a central and formative role by the appellants Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam in the alleged conspiracy.
Notice the wordings here – ‘central’ and ‘formative’ role played by the appellants, which is not something which can be ignored. Also, pointing out the bail of others is important because if the bench – at the behest of the state – wanted to punish dissent across the board would not have released five of the seven appellants from the very same case.
On the question of delay, the court was equally clear that responsibility cannot be pinned on one side. It examined the trial’s history and noted that the case involves many accused persons, a huge volume of documents and electronic evidence, several chargesheets filed over the years and repeated disputes over sharing material under Section 207 of the CrPC. Further, it also recorded that objections and requests for adjournment had come from the defence side as well, which too contributed to the delay. For instance, seven of the fourteen adjournments in 2023–24 were requested by Khalid’s side. What the court said on the issue of delay was very interesting. It observed that delay in a case of this kind “does not operate as a trump card that automatically displaces statutory restraint.”
It further held that the record did not support the claim that the accused had been “innocently incarcerated”. It observed “the record does not support the absolute proposition that the appellants have remained “innocently incarcerated” without any contribution to delay, nor does it disclose a situation where the delay is so wholly unjustified as to override the statutory embargo contained in Section 43D(5)”.
In simple words, if I break it down for you, then this means that blaming the delay of the trial on the government alone, as most of the narratives suggest – is not what the record actually shows.
But if one were to look into the tone and tenor of the commentaries – from social media reels and videos to conventional reporting around the issue – the nuance is the casualty. The convenient story is that the government is causing the delay in the trial, and the delay is wilful to penalise the dissenter. From there, the jump to identify the current state as a ‘terror state’ doesn’t seem too far. This story is click-bait worthy, dramatic, provocative and shareable. The consequence is not a credible discourse around a sensitive issue – but politicisation of an issue for a prejudiced agenda
This doesn’t imply that the issue of personal liberty is to be taken lightly. Indeed, the burden must always fall on the state to justify prolonged incarceration and the public discourse must be vigilant in this regard. The vigilant public discourse therefore should be as emphatic about the question of liberty as it should be about the cases which threaten the same. Organised conspiracy and coordinated violence are cases of such acts which may fall under the category of grave exceptions which require special provisions. But whether a grave exception truly exists in any specific case is not something television debates, self-righteous content creators, social media threads or politically committed intellectuals are equipped to decide. That must be decided by the courts, and in matters as serious as this, ultimately by the Supreme Court of India. Trusting that process is not capitulation to the powerful. It is a basic pre-requisite in a constitutional democracy.
This is why a large part of today’s media commentary on this case deserves sharp criticism. Institutions must be questioned — that is healthy, and indeed necessary. A judiciary, an investigating agency, a police force, or a government that cannot be criticised is not a democracy. But there is a real difference between questioning an institution’s reasoning and simply discarding that reasoning because it does not fit a preferred political story.
Much of the coverage around Umar Khalid does the latter. It invokes his incarceration constantly as proof that democracy is dying under what they call an authoritarian Hindutva government, while completely ignoring the observations of the institution — the Supreme Court — that has actually examined the facts. The court is conveniently cited only when its outcome is useful, and abandoned the moment its reasoning becomes inconvenient.
That is not journalism holding power accountable. It is ideological point-scoring dressed up as concern for civil liberties.
What this amounts to is a form of institutional nihilism. It is not scepticism, which questions an institution’s reasoning while still accepting that the institution has a legitimate role to play. It is something closer to a refusal to accept any institutional outcome that does not already match a pre-determined conclusion. Guilt or innocence or the delay or diligence – none of it is actually decided by looking at what the court said. It is decided in advance, by which political camp the commentator already belongs to, and the judgment is then either borrowed or discarded depending on which move helps that camp. This is corrosive precisely because it wears the appearance of vigilance while doing the opposite of what vigilance requires: it treats “the system is rigged” as a starting assumption rather than a conclusion that would need to be earned from the evidence.
This distinction matters more than it might seem. Criticism of government is integral to democracy, but criticism has to be built on the facts and not around them. When media portals turn a complex case into a one-line verdict against the regime, they are not protecting democratic values; they are hollowing them out from within.
Every time a court’s careful, differentiated reasoning is ignored in favour of a punchier narrative, the public loses a little more of its ability to tell the difference between a considered judicial finding and political bickering. And every time that happens, the next unfavourable verdict becomes just a little easier to dismiss as “captured” or “compromised.” This is a dangerous trend in a democracy, regardless of which political side currently benefits from it. Taken far enough, institutional nihilism does not just damage trust in one court or one case; it teaches an entire public that no institutional verdict is ever final until a politically convenient outcome is attained.
In my opinion, a reasonable public discourse would look very different. It would look at the six years of incarceration seriously as a constitutional concern, which needs to be debated and discussed without assuming blame a priori. It would also hold the government accountable for real delay while acknowledging that a case with dozens of accused and years of documentary evidence is not going to move quickly. It would criticise the Supreme Court’s reasoning on the merits if it disagrees, rather than pretending the reasoning does not exist. And it would recognise that faith in institutions and criticism of institutions are not opposites; they are central to the smooth functioning of democracy.
Lastly, if Khalid is eventually acquitted, or if wrongdoing by the prosecution comes to light, the state must answer for it in full, and this essay does not argue otherwise. But until that day, the honest position is neither blind faith in the government nor automatic suspicion of every court ruling that does not suit a preferred story. What today’s loudest coverage of this case is doing is neither of those things. It is manufacturing certainty where none exists, and calling it courage. That is not a service to democracy. It is a slow erosion of the very trust that democracy needs to survive, and it deserves to be named as such.
