NEW DELHI: The Delhi High Court on Wednesday granted bail to prominent Kashmiri human rights activist Khurram Parvez in the terror-conspiracy and terror-funding case registered against him by the National Investigation Agency (NIA) under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), more than four and a half years after his arrest, holding that his prolonged incarceration, with no end to the trial in sight, weighed decisively in favour of his release.
A division bench of Justice Navin Chawla and Justice Ravinder Dudeja allowed Parvez’s appeal against the December 13, 2024, order of the special NIA court at Patiala House, which had rejected his bail application on the ground that the allegations against him appeared prima facie true. “We have granted bail, subject to various conditions,” the bench said while pronouncing the verdict, according to court verdict.
The relief, however, does not immediately end Parvez’s legal troubles. He remains an accused in a separate NIA case, in which a hearing is scheduled next month, and his actual release from custody will depend on the outcome of proceedings in that matter, a caveat the High Court itself recorded, clarifying that his release under Wednesday’s order remains subject to any orders in other cases in which he may be detained.
Parvez, Program Coordinator of the Srinagar-based Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society (JKCCS) and Chairperson of the Asian Federation Against Involuntary Disappearances, was arrested by the NIA from Srinagar on November 22, 2021. After a series of police custody remands, he was sent to judicial custody on February 25, 2022. His total incarceration now stands at over four and a half years.
Notably, Parvez was not named in the original First Information Report, registered on November 6, 2021, on central government inputs about the banned Pakistan-based terrorist organisation Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) allegedly building a network of “over-ground workers” (OGWs) in India. He was arrested during the investigation and named Accused No. 1 in the charge sheet the agency filed in May 2022 against seven persons, including a serving NIA Superintendent of Police, Arvind Digvijay Negi.
The NIA alleged that, under the cover of human rights activism, Parvez recruited co-accused Muneer Ahmad Kataria as an OGW for the LeT and personally introduced him to a Pakistan-based handler identified as Hyder alias Ali alias Yusuf, described as the chief operating commander of the LeT’s Jammu and Kashmir module. He was further accused of collecting information on the movement and structure of the Army, paramilitary and police, including a dossier of officers titled “High-Ranking Perpetrators”, maintaining links with Pakistan-based terrorist organisations, and instigating violent protests after the July 2016 killing of Hizbul Mujahideen commander Burhan Wani.
The agency also alleged that Parvez paid a bribe of Rs 1.5 lakh, routed through Kataria, to Negi to compromise an earlier NIA investigation and secure the release of digital devices seized from his home and the JKCCS office. He was charge-sheeted under IPC provisions relating to criminal conspiracy and conspiracy to wage war, sections of the UAPA covering terror funding, recruitment and membership of a terrorist organisation, and the Prevention of Corruption Act.
Kataria turned approver in July 2025. In a statement before a magistrate, he claimed he had worked as an NIA informer since 2019, that Parvez introduced him to the LeT handler over a video call in 2020, and that he ferried the alleged bribe to Negi at Parvez’s request.
In his appeal, Parvez contended that the prosecution’s case was unsupported by evidence and that he was a “factual stranger” to the larger conspiracy alleged by the NIA. Senior Advocate Tanveer Ahmed Mir, appearing for him, told the court that his client had spent more than four years in custody while the trial remained stuck at the stage of framing of charges, with the prosecution proposing to examine 197 witnesses — delay that was itself a ground for bail even under the UAPA’s stringent regime.
His counsel argued that there was no digital evidence of contact between Parvez and any proscribed terrorist organisation, no call detail records of the alleged meeting with Kataria, no evidence that he passed sensitive military information to any terrorist operative, and no money trail linking him to terror funding. The central allegation of recruitment, the defence stressed, rested on the uncorroborated word of a co-accused-turned-approver who himself claimed to be an NIA informer.
The defence maintained that the documents the NIA characterised as intelligence-gathering were in fact part of published human rights reports — the “Structures of Violence” report of 2015 and the “Alleged Perpetrators” report of 2012 — which remain publicly available on the JKCCS website, were largely compiled from RTI responses, and were even shared with the Indian Army, which responded publicly at the time. The court noted that the Special Public Prosecutor did not dispute this. Parvez rejected the suggestion that his visits to Pakistan in 2007 and 2015 connected him to banned organisations, saying they were open trips on valid visas, part of humanitarian and advocacy initiatives.
Counsel also cited Parvez’s physical infirmity: he lost a leg in a landmine blast while monitoring elections in Kupwara in April 2004 and has used a prosthetic limb since.
Parvez was represented by Mir along with advocates Swati Khanna, Raminder Kaur, Md. Imran Ahmad and Shahzad Khan. The NIA was represented by Special Public Prosecutor Rahul Tyagi, with advocates Priya Rai, Shubham Goyal, Jatin and Amit Rohila.
Opposing bail, the agency argued that the case rested not on mere association but on overt acts: recruitment for the LeT, transmission of intelligence to a Pakistan-based handler, orchestration of public violence, possession of what it described as targeting lists of Indian Army personnel, and corrupt dealings with a former NIA officer. The prosecutor contended that Parvez, with sympathisers across the globe, posed a major flight risk, had a record of attempting to influence investigations, and that the approver’s statement stood corroborated by several protected witnesses.
The bench undertook what it called a “surface evaluation” of the prosecution case, noting that it was primarily based on the approver’s statement — evidence that is “yet to be tested in trial”. It observed that the allegations had to be weighed against the length of Parvez’s detention, the unlikelihood of the trial concluding soon, and the principle that bail is the rule and jail the exception.
The judges held that the appellant’s rights under Article 21 of the Constitution “need to be balanced and may even trump” the restrictions on bail imposed by Section 43D (5) of the UAPA. The court surveyed the Supreme Court's evolving jurisprudence on the tension between that provision and the right to a speedy trial. It traced the line of cases from K.A. Najeeb through this year's rulings in Gulfisha Fatima and Syed Iftikhar Andrabi. The Andrabi ruling highlighted that UAPA conviction rates in Jammu and Kashmir have run below one per cent. The bench noted that although the question has been referred to a larger bench, High Courts must continue to decide cases on the law as it stands.
The bench distinguished the case of co-accused Zafar Abbas, whose bail rejection was upheld by the Supreme Court, saying the allegations against him were “very different”, and accepted that Parvez’s infirmity deserved special consideration. It made clear that its observations were not findings on the merits of the case.
Bail was granted on a personal bond of Rs 2 lakh with two sureties, alongside stringent conditions. These include: Parvez must surrender his passport, cannot leave the National Capital Territory of Delhi without the trial court’s permission, must use only one phone kept always switched on, and must report to the investigating officer every fortnight.
He is barred from contacting or influencing any witness, from tampering with evidence, and from making any public statement, including on social media, touching on the merits of the case, the evidence or the trial. The order also prohibits him from circulating “any anti-national material” on any platform.
The other case in which Parvez awaits a hearing in the first week of July stems from an FIR registered by the NIA on October 18, 2020. The sweeping complaint named neither Parvez nor the JKCCS, instead broadly indicting “NGOs, Trusts and Societies” as participants in a larger criminal conspiracy prejudicial to India’s unity, integrity, sovereignty and security.
Parvez was arrested in that case on March 22, 2023, nearly two and a half years after it was registered, while he was already in jail in the LeT-related matter. The agency alleged that the JKCCS was not registered as an NGO or under the Foreign Contribution (Regulation) Act, 2010, which governs foreign funding of organisations, and that it received money from, and worked at the behest of, Pakistan’s intelligence agency, Hizbul Mujahideen commanders and separatists based in Pakistan-occupied Kashmir and the Valley.
At the heart of that charge sheet is the JKCCS’s 2015 report, “Structures of Violence”, which examined the role of the state in Jammu and Kashmir against a backdrop of more than 8,000 disappearances, 70,000 deaths, thousands of unmarked mass graves and widespread allegations of torture and sexual violence. The NIA described the report as false and fabricated, claiming it disclosed sensitive details of troop deployment and the names of police and army officers posted in sensitive areas, was published to damage India’s image internationally, and that drafts were shared with Pakistan-based handlers, with terrorist commanders facilitating its release at forums in Pakistan.
The report itself, however, has been freely available online since its publication in September 2015. It documented 333 cases of alleged human rights violations — 198 case studies of extrajudicial killings involving 415 victims, and 73 cases of enforced disappearances covering 89 persons — and argued that the pattern of named perpetrators, ranks and units showed abuses occurring across Jammu and Kashmir.
Lawyers have questioned why, if the government considered the report’s contents sensitive or contestable, it did not take the matter up with its authors at the time of publication, rather than citing a nine-year-old public document as evidence in a terrorism case, as reported by Article 14.
Parvez’s prolonged detention drew sustained international criticism, with global rights bodies and UN experts repeatedly demanding his immediate and unconditional release. In 2023, while still in jail, he was named one of three recipients of the Martin Ennals Award, a prestigious international honour that recognises outstanding defenders of human rights.
His work has long made him a significant figure, and inconvenient to the authorities in Jammu and Kashmir. The JKCCS has produced detailed documentation of alleged human rights violations in the region, including reports on the impunity enjoyed by security forces and police. Legal commentators and rights lawyers have pointed out that the case against Parvez cites JKCCS reports as evidence of tarnishing India’s image and promoting secessionism “under the garb of human rights”, an approach, they warn, that effectively criminalises human rights research and fact-finding and could have a chilling effect on other organisations doing similar work.
Wednesday’s bail order is the latest chapter in Parvez’s long history of confrontation with the security establishment. In 2016, he was detained under the Public Safety Act in the aftermath of the protests triggered by Burhan Wani’s killing and spent 76 days in a Jammu jail before the High Court of Jammu and Kashmir quashed the detention order that November.
In October 2020, the NIA conducted searches at his residence in the NGO terror-funding case. A year later, in November 2021, he was arrested in the present matter.
With bail now secured in this case, charges in which are yet to be framed before the special NIA court in Delhi, attention turns to the other pending matter, where the hearing in July will determine whether Khurram Parvez finally walks out of jail.
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