Judicial Resolve

The Delhi’s High Court’s refusal of bail to Umar Khalid and others accused in the 2020 Delhi riots pierces the myths spun by Islamist groups and their left-liberal cheerleaders.

Delhi

The Delhi High Court’s denial of bail to Umar Khalid, Sharjeel Imam and Gulfisha Fatima - three of the more visible faces accused in the 2020 Delhi riots - offered a firm rebuke to a cynical campaign of obfuscation by Islamist groups and their fellow-travellers in India’s left-leaning media. The ruling underlined that what unfolded in north-east Delhi was no ‘spontaneous’ expression of democratic dissent but a calculated attempt to turn India’s capital into a battlefield and, in the process, besmirch the country abroad.

The court, faced with reams of evidence, brushed aside the appellants’ pleas of long incarceration and denied the easy refuge of ‘parity’ with others who had managed to secure bail. The judges observed that the allegations against Fatima, for one, were weighty as she had not only participated in the orchestration of the protests at Seelampur and Jafrabad but actively worked to escalate them into violence. Prosecutors detailed her instructions to women demonstrators to bring their children as human shields, her creation of WhatsApp groups to choreograph unrest, and her links with outfits such as Pinjra Tod and the Delhi Protest Support Group (DPSG), which coordinated sit-ins designed to snowball into road blockades and rioting.

The prosecution’s case, ably presented by the Solicitor General, was that these were not sit-ins gone awry but a “well-thought-out conspiracy” with a “sinister motive.” The plan, as investigators pieced together, aimed not merely at opposing the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) but at delivering a bloody spectacle that would coincide with Donald Trump’s visit to India in February 2020. The conspirators hoped to project to the world an India convulsed in sectarian hatred, and to punish Hindus for backing a government they loathed.

At least 53 lives were lost while hundreds were maimed in the riots. An Intelligence Bureau officer was lynched, a Hindu man named Dilbar Negi was dismembered and burned, and Islamist mobs torched homes and shops. The images of Shahrukh Pathan brazenly waving a pistol at police officers captured the brazenness of the assault.

Yet to read the secular press in India and a chorus of sympathetic academics abroad, one would imagine the accused to be heroic truth-tellers, prisoners of conscience locked up by an authoritarian state. Shaheen Bagh, the protest site lionised by liberal outlets as a ‘festival of resistance’ was presented as an echo of Martin Luther King Jr’s march on Washington. In fact, as the chargesheets have detailed, it was one among many nodes in a network that plotted disruption, blockades and ultimately bloodshed. The portrayal of Fatima and Khalid as martyrs to democracy is not only grotesque but dangerous. It normalises mob violence as a legitimate tool of politics and trivialises the pain of those who lost their families to the riots.

India’s government, like any other, certainly deserves scrutiny. But the wilful blindness of a self-styled secular commentariat, eager to turn Islamist provocateurs into folk heroes, corrodes public debate. By treating conspiracy as activism and rioting as resistance, they embolden precisely the forces that seek to destabilise India’s democracy from within. Their narratives feed seamlessly into the propaganda of Pakistan’s establishment and the fever dreams of jihadist groups, which thrive on claims of India’s alleged persecution of Muslims.

The Delhi High Court’s ruling matters because it punctures this mythology. It is important to realize that democracies do not fall only to tanks and coups but can be hollowed out by those who weaponize its freedoms of assembly, speech and protest for sectarian ends.

By standing firm, the Delhi High Court has restored a measure of seriousness to Indian justice. The judiciary’s role is not to pander to fashionable opinion, but to protect the republic from those who would tear it apart. In refusing bail to Khalid, Imam and the others, the court has reminded the country that democracy is safeguarded not by the shrill sloganeering of self-styled progressives, but by the quiet firmness of the law.