Sharjeel Imam has been in custody since 28 January 2020: six years and nearly nine months. No court has convicted him of anything. That fact comes first, because everything below depends on it.
His supporters have a slogan for this: “Jailed for a speech.” It travels well because it is short. It is also misleading. His speeches brought FIRs in five states, and in those cases the courts have mostly gone his way. What keeps him inside is a different case, under a different law, in which the speeches are only part of the evidence.
THE SPEECH CASES turn on two speeches, one at Jamia Millia Islamia on 13 December 2019 and the other at Aligarh Muslim University on 16 January 2020, during the protests against the CAA and the NRC. In Delhi, FIR 22/2020 charged him with sedition under Section 124A of the IPC, along with Sections 153A, 153B and 505. Section 13 of the UAPA was added later. Charges were framed in January 2022, and bail was refused the same month.
Here the defence has real wins. In October 2021, a Delhi court hearing a separate case over the December 2019 violence at Jamia refused him bail and found the speech to be on communal lines, but called the evidence that rioters acted on it “scanty and sketchy”. In May 2022, the Supreme Court froze all sedition proceedings; that September, the same court granted him bail in the Jamia case. The Allahabad High Court, granting him bail in the Aligarh case in November 2021, found that “on an undisputed basis neither the applicant called anyone to bear arms nor any violence was incited”.
On 29 May 2024, a Delhi High Court bench of Justices Suresh Kait and Manoj Jain granted him bail in FIR 22/2020 under Section 436A of the CrPC: he had served more than half the seven-year maximum for the UAPA offence. That is arithmetic, not a verdict on the speeches.
So the speech cases, taken alone, would have put him on the street. What keeps him in is the conspiracy case.
FIR 59/2020 alleges that the February 2020 riots in north-east Delhi, which killed 53 people (15 Hindus), were planned in advance, and names Imam among the accused. He faces UAPA Sections 13, 16, 17 and 18 here, with IPC offences alongside. This FIR is not about what he said on a stage in Aligarh. It is about what the prosecution says he built.
Section 43D(5) of the UAPA is the provision everyone reaches for. It bars bail if the case papers show the accusation to be prima facie true. Critics call it a wall. It is a high bar, but the Supreme Court has said it is not a wall: in K.A. Najeeb (2021), it held that long incarceration without trial can justify bail despite the section.
A trial court first refused him bail in this case in April 2022. The Delhi High Court refused it on 2 September 2025, calling the role of Imam and Umar Khalid in the alleged conspiracy “grave“. It also refused them parity with Devangana Kalita, Natasha Narwal and Asif Iqbal Tanha, who got bail in 2021.
ON 5 JANUARY 2026, a Supreme Court bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and N.V. Anjaria sorted the accused into two groups. Five got bail: Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Mohd Saleem Khan and Shadab Ahmad. The court placed them at a different level of participation. Khalid and Imam stood apart. The material, the bench said, attributed to them “a central and formative role“.
Note the verb. “Attributed” means the court read the prosecution’s material at face value, as bail law requires, and it said so itself. It convicted no one. But look at what the material is.
For Imam, the court listed a WhatsApp group called Muslim Students of JNU, created on 4 December 2019, pamphlets with what the High Court called “communal overtones”, meetings, statements of protected witnesses, and speeches. It noted that he had tried to frame the case as one “resting solely on speech”, and did not accept that. It described a chain, and speech was one link in it. That is a different case from the one on the poster.
The bench also said the speeches pointed to “deliberate paralysis of civic life” and the “choking of essential supplies”, not political criticism. Whether that crosses from protected expression into crime, it added, is for the trial. That is the right allocation. Nobody gets that call at the bail stage.
On delay, the bench applied the prima facie test but held that Najeeb does not lay down “a mechanical rule” either way. Delay matters, it said, and a constitutional court can step in when detention turns punitive. But delay alone had not reached that point for Imam and Khalid, and the record did not show that the delay was the prosecution’s doing.
Then it left a door open. Both men can apply again once the protected witnesses have been examined, or a year from the order, whichever comes first.
ON 18 MAY 2026, a different bench, Justices B.V. Nagarathna and Ujjal Bhuyan, granted bail to Syed Iftikhar Andrabi, accused in an unrelated narco-terror case under the UAPA and in custody for more than five years. In doing so it said it had “serious reservations on various aspects” of the January judgment, and that it had not applied Najeeb properly.
Four days later, Justice Aravind Kumar, sitting with Justice P.B. Varale, heard the bail pleas of two other accused in the riots case, Khalid Saifi and Tasleem Ahmed, and gave both six months’ interim bail. The bench called Najeeb “neither a charter nor a mathematical command“, and referred the question of UAPA bail after long incarceration to a larger bench. It also answered the criticism: “the obligation of judicial discipline is not discharged by merely criticising.” Conflicting views, it said, must go to a larger bench.
So one bench of equal strength has doubted the January ruling. None has overturned it. The larger bench is where that argument gets settled, and no order constituting it has been made public. Until it rules, the January judgment binds.
On 4 July 2026, a Delhi trial court refused Imam and Khalid bail again, saying it had “no option but to follow” the Supreme Court’s order. On 30 September 2026, a High Court bench of Justices Prathiba M. Singh and Dinesh Bhatt dismissed their appeals. Neither condition the Supreme Court set had been met, it said, and it could not modify that order. It also refused parity with Saifi and Ahmed, whose roles it found different.
Count the rulings. A trial court in 2022, the High Court in 2025 and the Supreme Court in 2026 each read the record and refused bail; the two rulings since have held the Supreme Court’s terms unmet. That pattern needs an answer, and “politics” is not one. The same judiciary bailed Imam in the speech cases, bailed Kalita, Narwal and Tanha in 2021, and bailed five co-accused in January and two more, for six months, in May. Courts that sort the accused by role and release some are not rubber stamps for the executive. They are reading files.
AT ALIGARH on 16 January 2020, Imam spoke about the National Register of Citizens in Assam. As reported and translated at the time, he told the crowd that if five lakh people could be organised, “we can permanently cut India and the North East”, and “if not permanently then at least for a month or so”. He named the “chicken’s neck”, the Siliguri corridor that joins the North East to the rest of India, and called it a Muslim-dominated area.
On 29 September 2026, The Quint published an interview with Imam, his answers relayed through family and friends to the journalist Athique Haneef. Imam says that in Hindi and Urdu usage “kaat”, cut, means blocking a road. He says he was “talking about chakka jaam as an effective means of protest”, and a temporary one at that. Had he said “block” instead of “cut”, he adds, he would have been arrested over some other speech anyway.
Put the two side by side. A chakka jaam is temporary by nature. The speech, as reported, said “permanently”, and offered a month as the fallback. Imam’s reading has to explain away the one word that does the work. The prosecution reads a plan to choke supply routes; Imam reads a call for a roadblock. A trial can test that, with the full recording, the witnesses and the chat logs. The Supreme Court said exactly that.
Two kinds of case, then. In the speech cases, the courts found the proof thin and gave him bail. In the conspiracy case, benches at every level have found enough, at the bail stage, to keep him inside. A doubt from one bench has gone to a larger one, and the January order stands until it rules. The window that order opened closes on 5 January 2027, or earlier if the protected witnesses are examined first.
That is the record. He is not convicted, and the slogan fails anyway. A man jailed for a speech would have walked out in 2024. Sharjeel Imam is still inside because of what the prosecution says he built, and every court that has weighed it has found it serious.
