Giving an “unpalatable” speech cannot by itself attract the rigours of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), the accused in the 2020 Delhi riots conspiracy case told the Supreme Court on Tuesday (December 9, 2025), as they concluded arguments on their bail pleas.
Senior advocate Siddharth Dave, appearing for Sharjeel Imam, apprised a Bench of Justices Aravind Kumar and N.V. Anjaria that the prosecution’s case rests almost entirely on speeches delivered by Mr. Imam, which, he contended, cannot ipso facto be construed as a “terrorist act” under Section 15 of the UAPA.
“The charge is not whether my speech individually falls foul of Section 15. The question is whether the speeches were conspiratorial in nature. If they were not, then Section 15 cannot be invoked,” he said.
Mr. Dave further pointed out that the Delhi Police had registered nearly 750 FIRs relating to the riots, yet Mr. Imam was not named in any of them. “This is a peculiar FIR where an alleged conspiracy is prosecuted separately from the actual acts said to have been committed pursuant to that conspiracy….I do not appear in any of the 750 FIRs. Is a speech, by itself, conspiratorial in nature?” he asked.
Along with Mr. Imam’s plea, the Bench was also hearing the bail pleas of activists Umar Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Meeran Haider, Shifa-ur-Rehman, Mohd. Saleem Khan and Shadab Ahmed, all accused of conspiring to orchestrate the unrest and charged under the UAPA. They have assailed the Delhi High Court’s September 2 order denying them bail, which had characterised their alleged roles as “grave” and indicative of a coordinated conspiracy behind the riots that left 53 people dead and hundreds injured in the national capital.
‘Meeting of minds’
Disputing Mr. Imam’s alleged role, Mr. Dave argued that his client had been arrested on January 28, 2020, nearly a month before the violence erupted. A charge of criminal conspiracy, he contended, presupposes a “meeting of minds”, whereas Mr. Imam had already been taken into custody weeks before the riots unfolded.
“Today, he stands before Your Lordships seeking bail. After almost six years in custody, Your Lordships may kindly consider releasing him, particularly when he was not physically present and is not an accused in any of the cases concerning the actual incidents of rioting. The speech is in Aligarh, yet I am prosecuted in Delhi,” he said.
However, Justice Kumar asked the senior counsel to respond to the prosecution’s core allegation that the speeches were not isolated political expressions but part of a coordinated plan to incite violence. “They [Delhi Police] say that the Aligarh speech was circulated in Delhi, which instigated the Delhi riots”, he said.
Mr. Dave then apprised the Bench that the Allahabad High Court had, in November 2021, already granted bail to Mr. Imam in relation to the speech delivered at Aligarh Muslim University in January 2019 during protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA). The High Court had recorded, he said, that it was “undisputed” that Mr. Imam had neither exhorted anyone to bear arms nor incited violence.
He then proceeded to play a compilation of Mr. Imam’s speeches, emphasising that several of them expressly called for non-violence and urged people not to “pick up stones”. The Bench, however, drew his attention to video clips earlier relied upon by the Delhi Police, in which Mr. Imam is purportedly heard speaking about “cutting off Assam” from the rest of the country and urging demonstrators to “choke supplies”.
The senior counsel conceded that some of his client’s speeches were “unpalatable”, but stressed that they could not attract the stringent provisions of the UAPA in the absence of any demonstrable consequences. He argued that the prosecution had failed to establish a causal nexus between the speeches and the subsequent violence.
“Some of his speeches are unpalatable. It could have been better worded. It could have remained within the four corners of law… but if the speeches had led to the riots, I would have been prosecuted for the riots. There has to be some overt act, some speech that says that within so-and-so days commit this act”, he submitted.
Earlier, senior advocate Kapil Sibal, representing Mr. Khalid, had cautioned that treating protest speeches as criminal acts would render ordinary dissent prosecutable under the stringent anti-terror law. He read out portions of Mr. Khalid’s speeches in which he invoked Gandhian principles and explicitly urged non-violence. “These are young students who agitated. We also agitated when we were young. If you protest, is there a point in keeping me in jail? This can’t be the law of the country,” he said.
No ‘overt act’
Senior advocate Salman Khurshid, appearing for Mr. Rehman, argued that a criminal conspiracy requires an agreement to commit an unlawful act and an accompanying “overt act”, neither of which, he contended, the prosecution had established. “Privacy and secrecy are more the attributes of a conspiracy than a loud discussion in an elevated place open to public view,” he submitted.
He added that participation in a nationwide protest could not, by itself, justify imputing criminal intent to every individual involved. “When there is a protest movement, people from different parts of the country join in. To assume that everyone who responds to the protest is a conspirator is very unfortunate. Mahatma Gandhi engaged in civil disobedience. It was defiance of law, but defiance does not mean violence,” he said.
The Bench took note of the submissions and posted the matter for further hearing on December 10. Additional Solicitor-General S.V. Raju, representing the Delhi Police, is expected to present his closing submissions on Wednesday. He had earlier indicated that several arguments advanced on behalf of the accused were factually erroneous and that he would make the necessary clarifications before the court.
The Delhi Police had previously argued that the violence in the capital was not the result of a peaceful protest against the CAA turning volatile, but “a clear terrorist act”. Mr. Raju had argued that the scale of the violence and the intent behind it left “no doubt” that the conspiracy extended far beyond civil demonstrations against the CAA. He had further submitted that the broader objective of the protests was “regime change,” drawing parallels with violent political uprisings in Bangladesh and Nepal.
Published – December 09, 2025 10:10 pm IST
