A Delhi court granted bail this week to human rights activist Khurram Parvez and journalist Irfan Mehraj in a terror funding case registered by the NIA. On the surface, it reads like routine news. But UAPA bail rarely works the way ordinary criminal bail does, and this order is a good example of why the distinction matters.
The Case Against Them
The case goes back to October 2020, when the NIA registered an FIR alleging that certain Kashmir-based NGOs and trusts were collecting funds domestically and abroad, and channeling them to sustain secessionist and terror-related activity in the Kashmir Valley. Parvez, who coordinated the Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society, was arrested in March 2023. Mehraj, a researcher formerly associated with the same organisation, was arrested around the same time. Both were booked under multiple sections of the UAPA, including provisions dealing with membership of unlawful associations and support for terrorist acts.
The Principal District and Sessions Judge at Patiala House Court, Pitambar Dutt, granted them regular bail, weighing in the delay in the trial along with other submissions made on their behalf. This came shortly after Parvez had already secured UAPA bail from the Delhi High Court in a separate, related NIA case in June.
Why UAPA Bail Is Different
Ordinary criminal bail runs on a fairly simple principle, bail is the rule and jail is the exception. UAPA bail flips that logic. Section 43D(5) of the Act says a court cannot grant bail if, after going through the case diary and chargesheet, it finds reasonable grounds to believe the accusation is prima facie true.
That single clause has reshaped how UAPA cases play out in practice. In NIA v. Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali (2019), the Supreme Court read this bar strictly, holding that courts must accept the prosecution’s material at face value at the bail stage, without weighing its reliability the way they normally would. That makes UAPA bail exceptionally hard to get once a chargesheet has been filed, since the accused effectively can’t challenge the evidence at this stage, only argue that it doesn’t meet the threshold at all.
What the Court Actually Said
In this case, the trial court leaned on a specific weakness in the prosecution’s case rather than the general delay alone. It noted that the allegations against Parvez rested mainly on oral witness testimony, which would need to be tested during the actual trial rather than accepted outright. That distinction matters under the Watali framework, since it goes to whether the material even clears the prima facie threshold in the first place.
The order also drew on the Delhi High Court’s earlier reasoning from June, which had factored in Parvez’s health condition, describing him as infirm, while granting bail in the related case.
The Bigger Picture: Delay, Article 21, and UAPA Bail
The stricter test under Section 43D(5) isn’t absolute, though. In Union of India v. K.A. Najeeb (2021), the Supreme Court carved out a separate route, holding that when trial delays stretch on for years without any real progress, the right to a speedy trial under Article 21 can override the statutory bar on UAPA bail. Parvez had been in custody since 2023, with the trial nowhere close to concluding, which is exactly the kind of delay courts have increasingly weighed in recent UAPA bail decisions such as Vernon Gonsalves and Jalaluddin Khan.
This tension, between a strict statutory bar meant to keep genuinely dangerous accused persons off the streets, and the constitutional promise that pre-trial detention shouldn’t itself become the punishment, is really what personal liberty arguments before conviction are built around, and it sits at the centre of most UAPA bail litigation today.
Conclusion
This bail order doesn’t mean the case against Khurram Parvez and Irfan Mehraj is over, the trial itself is still pending. What it shows is how UAPA bail decisions actually get made, not through the ordinary bail-is-the-rule approach, but through a narrower search for either a weak prima facie case or a delay serious enough to trigger Article 21. Both routes came together here, and that combination is fairly rare in UAPA bail matters.
Written By – Khushi Mittal
