Activist Umar Khalid has 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, Live Law reported on Wednesday.

On September 2, a High Court bench of Justices Navin Chawla and Shalinder Kaur dismissed the bail petitions of Khalid, Gulfisha Fatima, Sharjeel Imam, Mohd Saleem Khan, Shifa Ur Rehman, Athar Khan, Meeran Haider and Abdul Khalid Saifi.

Another division bench of Justices Subramonium Prasad and Harish Vaidyanathan Shankar rejected the bail petition of another accused person, Tasleem Ahmed.

The nine accused persons have been in jail for more than five years.

On September 8, Live Law reported that Fatima had moved the Supreme Court against the High Court’s order. Imam had moved the top court on September 6.

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.

The police had alleged that Khalid had “coalesced a coalition of the current government haters that led to the formation of Delhi Protest Support Group on WhatsApp”.

The police had also alleged that the WhatsApp group was formed after Khalid mentored a group of students called “Muslim Students of JNU [Jawaharlal Nehru University]” with the help of Imam to incite violence.

In the 200-page chargesheet filed in November 2020, the police specifically alleged that Khalid “remotely controlled” the Delhi riots. They claimed that Khalid had held a “secret meeting” where he allegedly outlined the details to carry out the riots.

However, Khalid’s lawyer contended that “merely being on a group is not any indication of anything wrong, in this case I have not even said anything”.

“[I] only shared the location of a protest site when someone asked for it,” he said. “Someone sent me a message. If someone chooses to inform me, it is not attributable to me. Anyway, there was no criminality in the message.”

Khalid and the other accused persons had sought bail primarily on the grounds that the trial had been delayed.

Also read: The price that Umar Khalid is paying for dissenting in Modi’s India

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