India: Ongoing detention of activists without bail, criminalisation of dissent and ban on books

India’s civic space is rated as ‘repressed’ by the CIVICUS Monitor. Even as the country celebrated its 79th Independence Day on 15th August 2025, the government continued to target activists and civil society organisations by misusing draconian anti-terror and sedition laws to silence dissent. Laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) are used to keep activists and academics behind bars and to fabricate charges against those critical of the government and its polarising, discriminative and anti-poor policies.

Authorities and government state machineries like the Enforcement Directorate and the Foreign Contributions Regulations authority (under the Ministry of Home Affairs) continue to target and block NGOs and human rights defenders’ access to foreign funding and resources under the guise of national-security and nationalistic rhetoric that positions those receiving funding as working at the behest of foreign governments, and against the interest of the Indian people and State. In recent years, several academics, human rights defenders and journalists have also faced severe travel restrictions, arbitrary detentions at airports and interrogations by the immigration authorities, and several more have had their work visas suspended and even had their Overseas Citizen of India status cancelled.

In recent months, the draconian UAPA law has continued to be used to arrest activists or keep them behind bars without bail, while a prominent college cancelled a lecture following intimidation. There were allegations of enforced disappearances and torture of student and youth activists in and around the city of New Delhi and concerns about the Maharashtra special public security bill. Journalists faced threats, attacks and criminalisation, books were banned in Kashmir, while the government ordered a social media platform to block Reuters News accounts. There were crackdowns on protests around university fee hikes, by sanitation workers, pro-Palestine activists and the opposition.

Association

Few anti-terror law arrests lead to convictions

On 30th July 2025, it was reported that police and investigative agencies have arrested 8,947 people under the draconian Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), but only 252 have been convicted in five years between 2018 and 2022, according to Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) data.

Jammu and Kashmir have the highest number of arrested at 2,633 during the five years but only 13 people were convicted by the courts.

Since 2018, human rights defenders critical of the government have been implicated and imprisoned in politically motivated cases under the UAPA. Under the UAPA’s draconian provisions, activists remain in detention for long periods and are often denied bail even on health grounds. In May 2020, UN experts expressed concerns over the non-conformity of various UAPA provisions with international human rights law and standards.

According to the People’s Union of Civil Liberties, between 2015 and 2020, under three per cent of arrests under the UAPA led to conviction, and once arrested under the UAPA it usually takes a long time for a person to get bail. The implication is that the UAPA is being used as a tool to harass and detain activists and critics.

Student and labour rights activist Priyanshu Kashyap arrested

Priyanshu Kashyap, a former student at the Department of History, Delhi University was arrested by the National Investigation Agency on 29th July 2025. He was earlier picked up by the Haryana Crime Investigation Agency (CIA) from Hisar district around 26-27th July 2025 and was later arrested and taken to Lucknow by the NIA in connection with the fabricated ‘Lucknow Conspiracy Case’’.

The case started in September 2023 with the authorities targeting activists in UP, Haryana, Delhi and Punjab but, according to the Campaign Against State Repression coalition, has now become a weapon in the hands of the state for a wider crackdown on students, labour rights activists, advocates, journalists, intellectuals and others.

From December 2025, the state had been trying to intimidate and harass Priyanshu for his activism when his rented room was raided by the NIA in connection with the same case, along with other activists. Priyanshu, an activist from an Adivasi background belonging to Bastar, has always stood for the rights of students, workers, peasants, Adivasis, women, Dalits, religious minorities, and other oppressed sections of society.

Activists denied bail by the High Court

On 2nd September 2025, Delhi's High Court denied bail to nine individuals accused of baseless charges of conspiracy and of orchestrating the February 2020 riots in the Indian capital and held in custody for roughly five years, without a proper trial or conviction on terror charges.

Prominent student activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam were among those seeking bail.

The two activists, together with Mohd Saleem Khan, Shifa Ur Rehman, Athar Khan, Meeran Haider, Abdul Khalid Saifi, Gulfisha Fatima and Shadab Ahmed, were detained under the UAPA in 2020.

They were part of public protests against India's new Citizenship (Amendment) Act, or CAA, and the National Register of Citizens (NRC) — both introduced in 2019. The defendants' lawyers had argued that bail should be granted given the long period of incarceration without a proper trial, and on the principle of parity seeing as other co-accused facing similar charges had been granted bail.

More than a dozen attempts to arrange a bail hearing at India's Supreme Court repeatedly met with postponement, leading to the defendants again trying to appeal to the Delhi High Court instead.

Activist Khalid Saifi gets 10-day interim bail after five years in custody under UAPA

Anti-CAA activist and ‘United Against Hate’ (UHA) founder, Khalid Saifi, who has been in custody for the past five years under the UAPA, was granted 10 days of interim bail by Karkardooma Court on 9th August 2025.

The bail was sought for 15 days on humanitarian grounds , citing the deteriorating health of Saifi’s younger son. This is the first time Saifi has been granted interim bail since his arrest in connection with the 2020 Delhi riots case.

Khalid Saifi was arrested on 26th February 2020. According to Frontline Defenders, the human rights defender, who consistently appealed for protests to be carried out in a peaceful manner, was severely tortured by police immediately after his arrest.

Together with activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, Saifi and several others were booked on baseless charges under the UAPA and IPC for allegedly being the “masterminds” of the February 2020 riots, which had left 53 people dead and over 700 injured. Their arrests represent an attempt to silence dissent, in particular from minority Muslim voices.

BK-16 activists detained for years continue to seek bail

Academic and anti-caste activist Hany Babu was due to appear before the Bombay High Court seeking regular (indefinite) bail on 12th August 2025 after his request was approved by the Supreme Court on 16th July 2025. However, his bail hearing has been delayed without prior notice until 8th September 2025. He has spent more than 5 years in jail awaiting trial.

Hany Babu, who has been held in pre-trial detention since his formal arrest on 28 July 2020, has applied for bail on at least five separate occasions, including medical bail, but has yet to be approved.

On 3rd September 2025, The Supreme Court deferred the bail plea of advocate Surendra Gadling, an accused in the Elgar Parishad–Maoist links case, to 17th September 2025. Gadling is a human rights lawyer and General Secretary of the Indian Association of People’s Lawyers (IAPL). He was arrested in the early hours of 6th June 2018 under the UAPA.

Both men are part of 16 writers, scholars and activists, referred to as the Bhima Koregaon (BK) 16, who have been targeted under India’s counterterrorism law, the UAPA, due to their alleged association with the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist) organisation. There have been numerous procedural failings and irregularities impacting the BK-16 cases, including accusations of evidence tampering and more recent reports of the discovery of Pegasus spyware on at least one of the accused’s devices prior to his arrest.

Six others from BK-16 remain detained including Sudhir Dhawale, Mahesh Raut, Rona Wilson, folksingers Ramesh Gaichor, Sagar Gorkhe and Jyoti Jagtap.

Prominent college cancels lecture following intimidation

On 10th August 2025, the St. Xavier College in Mumbai called off its annual Stan Swamy Memorial Lecture after the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) - a right-wing student organisation, affiliated with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) - protested against the event in a letter to the college administration. In the letter the ABVP wrote that the lecture glorified a person accused of committing ‘anti-national conspiracies’, with ties to the banned CPI (Maoist), and further added that an event like this would ‘instil anti-national ideology in the college campus’.

Academics have expressed outrage over the cancellation of the event, calling the allegations unfounded as no charges were proven against Father Stan Swamy. Swamy - an 84-year-old Jesuit priest and a senior tribal rights activist - died in custody in July 2018. He was arrested in October 2020 under the UAAP for links to the banned CPI (Maoist) organisation. He was one of 16 activists and academics arrested for allegedly instigating violence at Bhima Koregaon near Pune in January 2018.

Enforced disappearances and custodial torture of student and youth activists

In July 2025, a joint statement was issued highlighting concerns of allegations of enforced disappearances and torture of student and youth activists in and around the city of New Delhi, the national capital of India.

Students speaking out on the ongoing state violence in the Adivasi region of Bastar, Chhattisgarh, in central India, and the increasing systematic exclusion of Muslims as citizens of India, were being picked up by the police, detained and interrogated.

According to the statement, on 17th-18th July 2025, ground reports alerted that many student and youth activists, including some of those who had been targeted in previous incidents, had been missing for several days and more were continuing to disappear.

On 9th July 2025, activists Gurkirat, Gaurav and Gauraang of the Bhagat Singh Chhatra Ekta Manch were forcibly disappeared in Delhi. On 11th July 2025, Ehtmam and Baadal of the Forum Against Corporatisation and Militarisation, which has been campaigning against the state excesses in Bastar, was also disappeared in Delhi. Around the same time, Samrat Singh was disappeared from Yamunanagar, Haryana. No arrest warrants were produced and for some days no-one knew where they had gone, and they had no access to their family or to legal counsel.

The Campaign Against State Repression (CASR) noted that while in custody, the activists were “stripped naked, beaten, electrocuted, and subjected to degrading treatment including having their heads submerged in toilet bowls. The police also issued horrific threats of sexual violence, particularly against female activists, who were told they would be raped using rods.”

They were asked to sign blank documents that might be used against them or to incriminate other activists in due course. They were then released one by one around 18th July 2025. One student, Rudra, remains disappeared since then.

Concerns about the Maharashtra special public security bill

In July 2025, The Maharashtra legislative assembly passed the Special Public Security bill which seeks to prevent unlawful activities of left-wing extremist organisations with a focus on urban Naxalism.

However, Amnesty International has raised concerns about the law. The term “urban naxalism” has no legal definition in Indian law. It is a rhetorical and politically charged phrase – popularised in media and political discourse, not jurisprudence. Its vagueness allows it to be weaponised against civil society, often conflating peaceful dissent with sedition or terrorism.

Other concerns include discriminatory targeting based on political beliefs, vague and overbroad definitions and the lack of independent judicial oversight. The law also allows sweeping powers of search, seizure and forfeiture, and denial of access to remedies and legal recourse.

Section 14 prohibits appeals, while Section 17 provides blanket immunity to government officials, even in cases of abuse. Such clauses eliminate accountability and breach Article 2(3) of the ICCPR, which mandates effective legal remedies for rights violations and renders all offences non-bailable. This facilitates prolonged pre-trial detention without judicial scrutiny.

Expression

Journalists faced threats, attacks and criminalisation

India is one of the world’s most dangerous countries for the media. According to Reporters Without Borders (RSF), journalists who are critical of the government are routinely subjected to online harassment, intimidation, threats and physical attacks, as well as criminal prosecutions and arbitrary arrests.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), on 4th July 2025, journalist Sneha Barve, founder of the Samarth Bharat Pariwar YouTube-based news channel, was attacked by a group of men while reporting on alleged illegal construction on disputed land in Manchar, Pune district. A video of the attack shows a man striking Barwe with a wooden rod before she loses consciousness. Three weeks after the brutal assault, she received death threats. On 24th July 2025, Prashant Pandurang Morde – who was arrested for his role in the earlier attack on the journalist – accosted her outside her office in the town of Manchar and threatened her, saying, “This time, we should finish the matter for good.”

RSF reported in August 2025 that journalists in Manipur, a small state in India’s northeast that has been torn by ethnic conflict for the past two years, faced physical attacks, intimidation and restrictions on movement.

Both armed militias and the law enforcement present in Manipur also obstruct the work of journalists by confiscating their equipment, denying them access to certain areas and even bringing spurious legal proceedings against them to intimidate them. Journalists also find themselves being ordered not to cover entire segments of the state, which is fragmented by community affiliation.

On 19th August 2025 it was reported that the Guwahati Police had summoned senior journalists Siddharth Varadarajan and Karan Thapar of The Wire in connection with a case registered on sedition charges under Section 152 of the criminal code (BNS). The police did not share any information about the case and repeated calls made to senior police officials to know about the case were unanswered.

Books banned in Kashmir

On 21st August, human rights groups issued a joint statement condemning the ban on 25 scholarly and journalistic books on Kashmir imposed by the Indian authorities.

Among the books banned are ‘Azadi’ by Booker Prize winner Arundhati Roy, ‘Human Rights Violations in Kashmir’ by Piotr Balcerowicz and Agnieszka Kuszewska, ‘Kashmiris’ Fight for Freedom’ by Mohd Yusaf Saraf and ‘’Kashmir Politics and Plebiscite’ by Abdul Gockhami Jabbar, journalist Anuradha Bhasin’s ‘A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir After Article 370’ and legal scholar AG Noorani’s ‘The Kashmir Dispute 1947-2012’. These books directly speak to rights abuses and massacres in Kashmir and dissect the region’s political journey over the decades.

The groups said that this measure, enforced under Section 98 of India’s criminal code (Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, BNS 2023), represents a far-reaching restriction on academic freedom, freedom of expression, and access to information. This ban is especially concerning because it reflects a broader pattern of repression in Kashmir, where human rights defenders, journalists, and civil society voices face ongoing intimidation, prosecution, and detention under vaguely worded security laws.

Government ordered social media platform to block Reuters News accounts

In July 2025, it was reported that the government had ordered X to block more than 2,000 accounts, including two belonging to Reuters News, the social media platform said in a sharp public attack on "ongoing press censorship" in India.

Two Reuters News accounts - @Reuters and @ReutersWorld - were suspended for India users late on 5th July 2025 and displayed a message saying they had been "withheld in IN (India) in response to a legal demand". The Reuters accounts were restored on 6th July 2025, but the status of the others was unclear.

However, India's Press Information Bureau said that no government agency had required the withholding of Reuters handles.

Section 69A of India's IT law allows the government to block public access to content "in the interest of sovereignty and integrity of India, defence of India, security of the state". Orders issued under the section are confidential in nature.

Peaceful Assembly

Students arrested and ill-treated by Uttar Pradesh police during fee hike protest

Students at the Aligarh Muslim University in Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh were arrested and ill-treated after they began a protest in early August 2025 against an arbitrary 36 percent fee hike by the university administration

The students demonstrated for six days by blocking the main entrance, Baab-e-Syed Gate, and demanding an immediate rollback of fees. They called the hike unfair for students from marginalised communities.

According to a news report, on 9th August 2025, the UP police entered the campus, assaulted students and dragged them away from the site. The students alleged that the police also used tear gas to disperse the students. Many students also alleged that girls were also dragged and pushed in the chest.

Crackdown on protests by sanitation workers

On 14th August, over 1000 sanitation workers were arrested for continuing their protest outside the Ripon Building in Chennai demanding fair wages, job security, and withdrawal of the privatisation of conservancy operations in 2 zones.

In response, there was a violent crackdown by the police, evicting 800 workers from the protest site in the early hours of 14th August. Several lawyers supporting the protest were also detained and subjected to brutal treatment in custody. Another crackdown on protests also occurred on 18th August in Madurai.

The National Alliance for Justice, Accountability & Rights (NAJAR), a collective of lawyers, law researchers, and legal activists across India, strongly condemned the violent police crackdown. They demanded the immediate and unconditional release of all detained workers, both in Chennai and Madurai, and called for accountability of officials responsible for the unlawful actions.

Activists charged for pro-Palestine protest

Student leader and PhD scholar at Maulana Azad National Urdu University (Manuu), Hyderabad, Talha Mannan, along with at least eight students, were booked by Aligarh police for chanting pro-Palestine slogans during a protest at Aligarh Muslim University on 4th August 2025.

The FIR, filed on the complaint of Hindu Raksha Dal’s Sanjay Arya, accuses Mannan of holding a demonstration near Bab-e-Syed Gate without permission and raising “provocative slogans” with eight to ten others. It states that videos of the protest circulated on social media and alleges the act could disturb communal harmony.

Student groups, however, have pointed out that no violence occurred during the protest and that the slogans were an expression of democratic dissent and solidarity with the oppressed people of Palestine.

Opposition lawmakers arrested after protesting against electoral roll revisions

Indian opposition leader Rahul Gandhi and dozens of lawmakers were temporarily detained by police in New Delhi on 11th August 2025 following a protest against perceived electoral malpractice.

Around 300 opposition parliamentarians, including Gandhi, marched towards the Election Commission headquarters, jumping barricades and shouting that recent elections had been "stolen." They claim that electoral rolls in key states have been altered to the benefit of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with more to come.

Ahead of the protest, the police blockaded roads around the Parliament building, set up barricades and deployed large numbers of security personnel. Joint Commissioner of Police Deepak Purohit confirmed the detention. He said that the opposition did not have police permission for a protest of this scale, and that only a group of 30 MPs had been allowed to march to the Election Commission and submit a complaint.