The judgments in Jyoti Jagtap and Umar Khalid show that the courts continue to be sites of contestation when it comes to UAPA, state and prosecutorial impunity, and under-trial incarceration. These two judgments belong to the “executive court” tradition, where the language of the court resembles – and often goes beyond – the language of the executive. In UAPA bail cases, the executive court’s judgments are marked by how judicial reasoning fills in the gaps in the prosecution’s case with inferences and assumptions, and innocuous and political legitimate forms of dissent are rendered illegal by transplanting them into a “larger conspiracy”, and how the issue of the conspiracy itself remains an assumption.
https://thewire.in/law/umar-khalid-jyoti-jagtap-bail-order-judicial-lottery-liberty
As we have seen, however, this is not the only way under the UAPA: the 2021 and 2022 bail judgments – that also come from the Bombay and Delhi high courts – show how a judiciary that is sensitive to the claims of individual liberty can act under the confines of the UAPA.
Much, therefore, will depend upon which of these two approaches, over time, finally transforms into “settled law”: in the meantime, each individual case represents an important site of the legal and constitutional struggle against the UAPA’s entrenchment of state impunity.
by Gautam Bhatia
21/10/2022