Supreme Court’s Andrabi judgment highlights the problem of ‘admissibility-blind’ bail adjudication in UAPA cases
A Division Bench last week while criticising two Supreme Court judgments for diluting the UAPA precedent in K.A. Najeeb, implicitly doubted why inadmissible evidence like uncorroborated disclosure statements were being treated as ‘prima facie’ proof to deny bail. Is this a new dimension in UAPA’s bail problem?
Published on: 29 May 2026, 08:52 am
LAST WEEK, on May 19, 2026, a Division Bench of the Supreme Court, comprising Justices B.V. Nagrathana and Ujjal Bhuyan, in Syed Ifitkar Andrabi v. National Investigating Agency, Jammu, granted bail to an under-trial prisoner from Kashmir who had spent nearly six years in custody under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967 (‘UAPA’), and Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances Act, 1985 (‘NDPS Act’), with over 350 witnesses still to be examined and no realistic prospect of his trial concluding within a visible horizon.
Andrabi is, in essence, a restatement of the liberty principle on bail under statutes like the UAPA, Prevention of Money Laundering Act, 2002 (‘PMLA’), and the NDPS Act. Yet, it also travels further to chastise the decisions of two coordinate benches (headed by Justice Aravind Kumar) that had not adhered to a binding precedent of a three-judge bench decision in Union of India v. K.A. Najeeb (2021). In its factual analysis, one can also witness a subtle emphasis that a Court, while adjudicating on bail, must conduct only a ‘prima facie’ assessment and not a ‘mini trial’.
Three days after Andrabi was delivered, on May 22, a Division Bench of Justices Kumar and P.B. Varale, while granting bail to Delhi riots conspiracy accused Tasleem Ahmed and Khalid Saifi referred to a larger bench the question of how Article 21 is to be applied against the statutory embargo on bail under Section 43(D)(5) of the UAPA. On May 20, the Delhi police had told the Court that following Andrabi, a larger bench reference may be needed given the existence of divergent views on grant of bail under UAPA.
In this essay, I focus on Andrabi’s reaffirmation of Najeeb and its criticism of recent decisions such as Gurwinder Singh v. State of Punjab (2024) and Gulfisha Fatima v. State (Govt. of NCT of Delhi) (2026) for diluting that precedent without formally overruling it. Secondly, I argue that Andrabi correctly addresses (but without theorising it) the growing phenomenon of what I term “admissibility-blind bail adjudication”, where courts accept chargesheet allegations and uncorroborated disclosure statements at face value while applying the prima facie standard under Section 43D(5) of the UAPA, even when such material is plainly inadmissible in evidence.