Calling the Bluff on the Delhi Riots

By denying bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, the Supreme Court has exposed the selective conscience of the so-called liberal ecosystem and the arrogance of foreign busybodies.

Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam

The Supreme Court’s refusal to grant bail to Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam sends a clear signal about where politics ends and law begins. After examining the prosecution material in the 2020 Delhi riots “larger conspiracy” case, the Court concluded that both men failed to cross the statutory threshold required for bail under India’s anti-terror legislation. A prima facie case exists; continued custody, for now, is justified.

The ruling is notable not for its severity but for its restraint. The bench carefully distinguished between the accused, granting bail under strict conditions to five others while holding that Khalid and Imam stood on a “qualitatively different footing.” In doing so, the Court reaffirmed a basic principle of criminal law that culpability is individual and not collective. That principle has been oddly contested in recent years, as political activism has increasingly sought to flatten legal distinctions into moral absolutes.

Selective Outrage

The reaction from India’s activist and Opposition ecosystem has been predictably indignant. The SC’s decision has been described as ‘cruel’ and ‘anti-democratic’ by sections of the so-called ‘progressive’ media, with particular outrage directed at the Court’s decision to allow the two men to reapply for bail only after a year or after protected witnesses are examined. Less attention has been paid to the same judgment’s emphasis on Article 21 of the Constitution, its acknowledgement of prolonged pre-trial detention as a serious concern and its willingness to grant bail even under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act where circumstances warranted it.

This selective reading is revealing. For years, India’s left-liberal establishment has laboured to turn Khalid and Imam from accused individuals into secular saints. An irrational opposition to Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the ruling BJP has functioned as a moral solvent, dissolving all other considerations.

In this narrative, opposition to the Modi government functions as a form of moral insulation, rendering ordinary legal scrutiny suspect. The Supreme Court’s order thoroughly punctures that logic. It insists that dissent, however loudly proclaimed, is not a defence to allegations of criminal conspiracy linked to violence.

The contrast with earlier cases is instructive. Colonel Prasad Purohit, accused in the 2008 Malegaon blasts, spent nearly nine years in prison (besides being brutally tortured) before being granted bail. Other Malegaon accused like Pragya Thakur endured prolonged incarceration without trial, amid gruesome custodial torture that were placed on judicial record. Their lives were dismantled by process long before evidence was tested.

Where were the open letters on part of this so-called ‘left liberal’ clique of journalists, academics and activists then? Where were the international petitions, the glowing profiles, the anguished columns about democracy in peril? There were none. Because those wrongly accused in the Malegaon blasts were from the Hindu community, their sufferings did not flatter the ideological tastes of India’s fashionably elite liberal salons. They were the wrong kind of accused - useful to forget, inconvenient to defend.

This asymmetry has become more pronounced as domestic political battles have been increasingly internationalised. Days before the Supreme Court ruling, a group of US Democratic lawmakers wrote to India’s ambassador expressing concern over Khalid’s detention. The letter invoked the familiar themes of democracy, pluralism and human rights allegedly under siege in Hindu majoritarian India of PM Modi.

None of these lawmakers made any attempt to seriously engage with the legal reasoning of Indian courts nor did they bother to study the riots. There was no mention of the deaths of those during the riots. The SC’s judgement is a tight slap on the faces of such entities who attempt to meddle with India’s sovereignty.

India’s courts, for all their flaws, remain institutionally independent. Bail decisions are not executive acts but are judicial determinations governed by statute and precedent. That foreign legislators should seek to influence them suggests a wilful misunderstanding of how India’s legal system functions.

Irresponsible Opposition

At the centre of this so-called ‘liberal’ ecosystem sits Rahul Gandhi. Unable to articulate a coherent governing alternative, the Congress leader has increasingly defined opposition politics as an exercise in negation by opposing Narendra Modi not on policy alone, but on the legitimacy of the Indian state itself.

While Gandhi and his sycophants brook no dissent within the Congress, they have left no stone unturned to portray the country’s courts and institutions as ‘compromised’ the moment they produce inconvenient outcomes. In this environment, figures like Khalid and Imam serve as vital props in a larger morality play.

More damaging still is the Congress leadership’s willingness to internationalise this narrative. Rahul Gandhi has repeatedly taken India’s domestic political disputes to foreign audiences, misleadingly portraying India’s institutions as hollowed out and its democracy as imperilled.

This has emboldened external actors who now feel entitled to intervene in India’s internal legal processes. The letter written by US Democratic lawmakers urging action in Khalid’s case was the logical outcome of years of domestic signalling by Gandhi and his Congress that India’s courts cannot be trusted unless they deliver outcomes favoured by the Opposition.

The letter was a masterpiece of moral vanity wherein democracy was invoked; pluralism was sermonised and human rights brandished like a diplomatic cudgel. In the narrative of these US lawmakers, the violence of February 2020 was a one-sided morality tale, with Muslims as permanent ‘victims’ and the Hindu-majority Indian state under Modi as the sole aggressor.

The SC verdict serves should serve as a firm reminder to these types that America’s Congress is not an appellate forum for Indian criminal cases. Nor does India require instruction on the rule of law from American legislators whose own system has normalised mass incarceration and indefinite detention without trial in the name of national security post-9/11.

That some of these lawmakers have built entire careers around moralising about India often through a reductive, religious lens only underscores how little their interventions have actually to do with law.

The controversies surrounding both men underline the problem. Sharjeel Imam’s public call to blockade India’s northeast was defended by their supporters in the ecosystem as ‘rhetorical excess’ rather than political intent. Likewise, Umar Khalid’s speeches during the period leading up to the riots, which are part of the prosecution record, are routinely dismissed by his defenders as ‘criminalised dissent.’

The deeper malaise of the left-liberal ecosystem has long been its inability to distinguish dissent from impunity. In its worldview, opposition to the Modi government is not merely legitimate but exculpatory. This is certainly not civil libertarianism but ideological absolutism masquerading as ‘principle.’

And this is the moral fraud at the heart of the Khalid-Imam campaign. The Supreme Court’s ruling, thus, has done far more than deny bail. It has punctured a decade of curated hypocrisy and narratives that made martyrs of the Delhi Riots accused.

The Court’s ruling makes it clear that it is not moved by hashtags, letters from foreign legislators, or curated indignation campaigns but are moved by the rule of law. In fact, the SC order is a rebuke not just to two accused men who have long been the darlings of liberal salons, but to an anti-national culture that demands immunity for its favourites while lecturing the nation on constitutionalism.

It affirms that liberty is not a sentiment but a legal condition, and that one that must coexist with accountability. And for everyone else, it is a quiet reassurance that India’s highest court still knows the difference between law and lobbying.