British Sikh Activist Freed After Nine Years in an Indian Jail
Jagtar Singh Johal has been released from a Delhi prison after the Indian high court warned the government it would be held in contempt if it continued to keep him detained despite a bail order issued on 18 September. He had been held for nine years without any full trial. He was released in the late afternoon and greeted by family and friends.
The mechanism of his release is as telling as the fact of it. His lawyers filed a writ of habeas corpus alleging he was being detained against the court’s express direction, and documents put before the court showed that messages from the prison to the Ministry of Home Affairs seeking permission to release him had simply gone unanswered. The high court instructed the government to let him go by two o’clock; it happened in the late afternoon. The allegation was that he transported £3,000 to France to fund a plot involving targeted killings in the Punjab in 2016 and 2017, and the campaign group Reprieve says the case never reached a full trial largely because the Indian authorities could not assemble credible witnesses to support it. His detention has been a running source of tension between London and Delhi, with campaigners arguing that successive British governments pressed neither for his release nor for a trial. Watch whether the charges against him are now formally dropped.