By Scroll Staff
Activist Sharjeel Imam on Saturday moved the Supreme Court against a Delhi High Court order rejecting his bail petition in a case in which he has been accused of being part of a “larger conspiracy” linked to the 2020 Delhi riots, The Hindu reported.
On September 2, a bench of Justices Navin Chawla and Shalinder Kaur had dismissed the bail pleas of Imam, Umar Khalid, Mohd Saleem Khan, Shifa Ur Rehman, Athar Khan, Meeran Haider, Abdul Khalid Saifi and Gulfisha Fatima. Another division bench of Justices Subramonium Prasad and Harish Vaidyanathan Shankar rejected the bail petition of another accused person, Tasleem Ahmed.
The ten accused persons have been in jail for more than five years.
The violence in 2020 had left 53 dead and hundreds injured. Most of those killed were Muslims.
The Delhi Police have claimed that the violence was part of a larger conspiracy to defame Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and was planned by those who organised the protests against the amended Citizenship Act.
On September 2, the bench comprising Chawla and Kaur, while dismissing the bail applications, said that on a preliminary reading, the role of Imam and Khalid in the alleged conspiracy was “grave”, and that they had allegedly delivered inflammatory speeches on communal lines.
The court said that the prosecution had carried out a “detailed investigation”, which led to four supplementary chargesheets being filed. Further, the statements of 58 witnesses have been recorded before a magistrate, the court said.
“In such a background, the pace of the trial will progress naturally,” the bench said. “A hurried trial would also be detrimental to the rights of both the Appellants and the State.”
Imam and the other accused persons had sought bail primarily on the grounds that the trial has been delayed. They also argued for parity with the other co-accused in the case – student activists Asif Iqbal Tanha, Devangana Kalita, and Natasha Narwal – who were granted bail in June 2021.
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