( Immediately release all political prisoners
Withdraw all illegal UAPA cases filed against leaders of
Mass organizations, intellectuals, Repeal the UAPA.)
Dharna
On 29th August. At Dharna Chowk, Indira Park, Hyderabad.
From 10 AM.
UAPA
How it started
UAPA was born in 1967. Under Indira Gandhi’s government. Right after the 1962 war with China. Back then it was not really an anti-terror law. It was mainly about banning associations and organisations that threatened India’s “unity and integrity”. Simple version: if a group was pushing for secession or messing with India’s sovereignty, government could declare it unlawful and go after its members.
The amendments, one by one
1969 amendment. Minor tweaks. Mostly procedural. To tighten how unlawful associations were banned and dealt with.
1972 amendment (via the Criminal Law Amendment Act). Again largely procedural. Aligning UAPA with criminal law changes of that period.
1986 amendment. Dealt with delegated legislation provisions. Technical rather than a big substantive shift.
2004 amendment. This is the real turning point. TADA had lapsed in 1995 and POTA was repealed in 2004. After massive misuse complaints. So the government folded anti-terror provisions straight into UAPA. It added a whole new chapter (Chapter IV). That chapter actually defines and punishes terrorist acts.
Before this, UAPA was not really an anti- terror law. After this, it became one.
2008 amendment. Came right after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks. It expanded the definition of terrorism. It made detention and bail rules much stricter. And extended the police custody and chargesheet filing timelines. This is where UAPA started getting more “draconian” teeth.
2012 amendment. Widened the definition further to include economic security, so things like fake currency smuggling that funds terrorism now count as a terrorist act too.
2019 amendment. Before this, only organisations could be banned as terrorist. Now, for the first time, the central government can label an individual as a terrorist too, put their name in the Fourth Schedule, without a trial or conviction. This is the amendment that drew the most criticism, since it lets the executive brand someone a terrorist purely on suspicion, no judicial process needed at that stage.
Judgments that tried to soften it
Raneef v State of Kerala, 2011, and Arup Bhuyan v State of Assam, 2011 (Supreme Court). These said mere membership of a banned organisation is not enough to convict someone. The person has to actually resort to violence or incite it. This borrowed a US free speech idea to protect people from guilt by mere association.
Union of India v K.A. Najeeb, 2021, 3 SCC (roughly). Big relief judgment. The Court said even though Section 43D(5) makes bail very hard under UAPA, that provision cannot override a person’s fundamental right to a speedy trial under Article 21. If someone has been in jail for years with no end of trial in sight, constitutional courts can still grant bail despite the statutory bar. This case is genuinely the softest, rather humane reading of otherwise repressive UAPA has gotten from the Supreme Court.
Vernon Gonsalves v State of Maharashtra, 2023, and later Shoma Sen, 2024, and Jalaluddin Khan, 2024. These followed the Najeeb logic and granted bail where evidence looked thin or incarceration had dragged on too long, showing courts trying to push back against automatic denial of bail.
Judgments that made it more stringent
NIA v Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali, 2019, 5 SCC 1. This is the one that made UAPA bail brutal. The Court said at the bail stage, judges should not go into the merits or weigh evidence carefully. They just need to see if the prosecution’s version looks broadly believable on its face, and if so, bail must be refused. Basically the accused’s evidence and defence do not get a fair look-in at bail stage. Lawyers still call this the toughest bail judgment in Indian criminal law.
Arup Bhuyan v State of Assam, 2023 (the same case revisited by a larger bench). This one is important and a bit ironic, because the earlier 2011 Arup Bhuyan judgment which was pro-accused got overruled here. The 2023 bench held that mere continued membership of a banned organisation is punishable under Section 10(a)(i) of UAPA, and upheld that provision. So the softer 2011 position was undone.
Gurwinder Singh v State of Punjab, 2024. Reasserted the old line that under UAPA, “jail is the rule, bail is the exception,” pulling back a bit from the more liberal trend.
Has anyone challenged UAPA itself, and what happened?
Yes, more than once.
Kartar Singh v State of Punjab, 1994, 3 SCC 569. This was actually about TADA, not UAPA directly, but it set the template courts still use. The Supreme Court upheld the law’s constitutional validity, since defence and anti-terror legislation falls within Parliament’s domain, but it laid down safeguards on how confessions and evidence should be handled. UAPA judgments still lean on this case’s reasoning.
PUCL v Union of India, 2004, 9 SCC 580. This was about POTA. The Court again upheld Parliament’s power to enact strict anti-terror laws but stressed that such laws must have safeguards against misuse. This case is often cited whenever UAPA’s validity is discussed too.
Sajal Awasthi v Union of India, Writ Petition (Civil) 1076 of 2019, filed right after the 2019 amendment. This directly challenges Sections 35 and 36, the provisions letting government tag individuals as terrorists. The argument is that it violates Article 14 (arbitrary, unguided power), Article 21 (right to reputation and dignity, since no chance to defend yourself before being branded a terrorist), and Article 19(1)(a) (chills free speech and dissent). A similar petition was filed by the Association for Protection of Civil Rights. This case is still pending. In early 2025 the Supreme Court actually pushed these petitions down to the Delhi High Court, saying such matters should first be heard there, so as of now it is being argued in the Delhi High Court, no final verdict yet.
Has the strict bail provision itself been challenged?
Section 43D(5), the provision that makes bail nearly impossible, has been challenged indirectly rather than struck down outright. Nobody has succeeded in getting the Supreme Court to declare it unconstitutional as such. What has happened instead is a workaround. In K.A. Najeeb, 2021, the Court did not strike down 43D(5), but it read it down in effect, holding that constitutional courts retain the power to grant bail on Article 21 grounds (excessive pre-trial detention, no speedy trial) even though the statute technically forbids it. So the provision survives on paper, but courts have carved out a constitutional escape hatch through it. Later cases like Vernon Gonsalves and Jalaluddin Khan used this same escape hatch.
So in short, UAPA’s core validity has survived every challenge so far, its harshest features (the individual terrorist tag and the tough bail bar) are both currently being fought over, one in the Delhi High Court and the other through case law workarounds, and the swing between softer and stricter has basically been a tug of war between Najeeb on one side and Watali plus the 2023 Arup Bhuyan ruling on the other.
The Delhi riots cases are one of the most important recent chapters in UAPA case law, and they cut both ways.
The big one: Asif Iqbal Tanha, Devangana Kalita, Natasha Narwal v State (NCT of Delhi), 2021, Delhi High Court
Three student activists, arrested for their alleged role in the larger conspiracy behind the February 2020 Delhi riots, were denied bail by the trial court. On 15 June 2021, a Delhi High Court bench of Justices Siddharth Mridul and Anup Jairam Bhambhani granted them bail, and did something bigger than just granting bail. It went into what actually counts as a “terrorist act” under Sections 15, 17 and 18 of UAPA, and held that ordinary protest, even if it turns into rioting or public disorder, is not automatically a terrorist act. The bench famously wrote that in its anxiety to suppress dissent, the state seemed to be blurring the line between the constitutional right to protest and terrorist activity, and called that a worrying trend for democracy. Since it found no prima facie case under those UAPA sections, the strict Section 43D(5) bail bar did not even apply, so it fell back on ordinary bail principles.
This was a huge deal. Because it directly narrowed how indiscriminately the police and NIA could stretch the definition of terrorism. To cover protest and dissent.
Supreme Court’s reaction
Delhi Police rushed to the Supreme Court against this. On 18 June 2021, a bench led by Justice Hemant Gupta did not stay the bail itself, the three stayed out of jail, but it clearly did not like the High Court going deep into UAPA’s interpretation inside a bail hearing. The Court called it “troubling” that a 100 page judgment reinterpreting the statute came out of a bail application where the law itself was not even under challenge.
It directed that the High Court’s judgment would not be treated as a precedent until the Supreme Court finally decided the matter.
That direction is still technically in force. So paradoxically, this landmark pro-liberty reasoning on protest versus terrorism cannot be formally cited as a binding precedent right now. Even though everyone in the progressive legal community treats it as persuasive and important.
What happened next
In May 2023, the Supreme Court dismissed Delhi Police’s appeal against Kalita’s bail. Specifically, letting the bail stand. But it still did not settle the larger question about the High Court’s interpretation of Sections 15, 17 and 18. So the core legal question, how narrowly or broadly should terrorist act be read when protest turns violent, remains open at the Supreme Court level even today.
There is also Umar Khalid, a co-accused in the same larger conspiracy case, whose bail pleas have been repeatedly rejected. Including by the Supreme Court. It shows how unevenly the Najeeb style speedy trial argument gets applied even within the same case.
So the net impact is this.
The Delhi riots litigation gave India its most detailed judicial attempt yet to separate genuine terrorism from political protest under UAPA. Yet the Supreme Court has kept that reasoning in legal limbo. Rather than either endorsing or rejecting it outright. The delay helps the state. Not the citizen-victims of the long hands of the law.
In the regime of BNS, section 113 defines a terrorist. So penal laws concerning terrorist crimes have transformed from extordinary to ordinary. The SP has to apply his mind and decide if the particluar crime must be registered under BNS or UAPA. But the law has not prescribed any yardstick for the Police top gun how on what basis he must decide the case should be registered under UAPA or under BNS. It is also unclear what stage the SP should decide to include the crime under which Act.
- Vimal
