India’s Supreme Court granted six months of interim bail to Tasleem Ahmed as well as Khalid Saifi, two individuals accused in the same 2020 Delhi riots conspiracy case in which Umar Khalid has remained detained without release. The limited interim bail, which requires the two men to comply with specified conditions and return to custody after the six-month period unless extended, provided temporary release after years of pre-trial detention under the UAPA framework.
The decision to grant interim bail to Ahmed and Saifi while Khalid remains detained reflected distinctions the court drew between their individual situations, potentially related to specific facts of their cases, the precise charges they face, or other considerations that the court weighed separately in evaluating each applicant’s circumstances. Bail decisions under the UAPA require individual assessment rather than uniform group determinations that treat all co-accused identically.
The 2020 Delhi riots case has resulted in a large number of arrests and prosecutions related to the violence that occurred in northeast Delhi in February 2020, during which dozens of people were killed and significant property was destroyed. The case has been contested on multiple levels, with accused persons challenging both the specific evidence presented against them and the application of anti-terror provisions to events that some argue were spontaneous communal violence rather than organized conspiracy.
Interim bail orders from the Supreme Court in high-profile cases often receive careful analysis from lawyers and commentators trying to understand what they signal about how the court views the prosecution’s case strength and the particular requirements of the UAPA’s stringent bail provisions as applied to individual accused persons with different factual profiles.
The orders were welcomed by the accused men’s families who had waited through years of detention for any form of relief from the pre-trial incarceration that had separated them from their households.
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Sources:
https://www.jurist.org/news/2026/05/india-dispatch-supreme-court-weighs-anti-terror-law-as-activist-enters-sixth-year-jailed-without-trial/