SC holds prolonged incarceration a gross violation of liberty, grants Muslim men bail after 12 years
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Twelve years later, relief came for two Muslim men from Rajasthan who were arrested over an alleged link with the banned outfit Indian Mujahideen after the Supreme Court held that their prolonged incarceration without the completion of the trial amounted to a gross violation of their fundamental right to liberty under Article 21 of the Constitution.
A Bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta held that the incarceration of Mohd Saquib Ansari and Waqar Azhar, owing to the extraordinary delay in the proceedings, deprived the petitioners of their liberty under the Constitution, and that the petitioners' 12 years of imprisonment so far, with no immediate prospect of the trial reaching its conclusion, could not be justified.
According to Maktoob Media, the case stems from an FIR filed by the Delhi Police in November 2011 under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), based on information provided by a Pakistani national arrested in the case regarding the alleged existence of the "Rajasthan Module" of the Indian Mujahideen, which was allegedly planning terrorist activities in and around Delhi.
The investigating agencies, upon their arrest, claimed to have recovered bomb-making material from places allegedly linked to Ansari in Jodhpur and Azhar in Jaipur in 2014, resulting in two additional cases being registered against them in Rajasthan; thus, they were charged in all three cases.
Initially, the trial court conviction of the duo in one of the cases registered in Rajasthan was suspended by the Rajasthan High Court in 2021, and, apart from securing bail in the second case, they remained in jail, with the UAPA prosecution being their sole obstacle to securing relief after the trial court and the Delhi High Court rejected their bail applications.
The Supreme Court Bench, which examined the trial log of the case through the e-Courts portal after the petitioners' lawyer argued that they had already spent almost 12 years behind bars while the prosecution had failed to complete its evidence, found that only 68 of the 197 prosecution witnesses had been examined so far and that, since January 2025, merely two witnesses had testified, one of them only partially.
Taking note that a co-accused had already been granted bail and finding no realistic possibility of the trial concluding in the foreseeable future, the Court directed the release of Ansari and Azhar on bail, subject to conditions imposed by the trial court.