UAPA Amendments: How Anti-Terror Law Powers Were Expanded

The Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act is India’s primary anti-terrorism law, and a 2019 amendment significantly expanded its scope. This article explains what changed, the low conviction rates the law has produced, and several specific high-profile cases that have shaped the public debate around it.

What the 2019 Amendment Changed

Before 2019, UAPA’s terrorist-designation power applied specifically to organisations, allowing the government to formally declare a group a terrorist organisation with accompanying legal consequences. The 2019 amendment extended this same designation power to individuals, allowing the government to formally label a specific person a terrorist, independent of any organisational affiliation, a significant expansion critics argued gave the state considerably broader discretionary power to apply the “terrorist” label to individual activists, journalists, or dissenters without necessarily requiring the same evidentiary threshold a full criminal conviction would demand.

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The Conviction Rate Data

Independent data analysis has consistently found UAPA’s conviction rate strikingly low relative to its arrest numbers. National Herald’s reporting, citing National Crime Records Bureau data, found the conviction rate for UAPA cases below 2 percent between 2015 and 2019. A separate analysis by FactChecker.in found that across a seven-year tracking period, 10,552 people were arrested under UAPA while only 253 were ultimately convicted, and government data cited by Madhyamam similarly found 10,440 arrests against just 335 convictions between 2019 and 2023, with the Centre separately telling the Rajya Sabha that 1,948 people were arrested in 2019 alone against just 34 convictions that year, according to Deccan Herald’s coverage of that parliamentary disclosure, a consistent pattern across multiple independent data sources showing a substantial gap between the law’s arrest volume and its ultimate conviction outcomes.

The Bhima Koregaon Case

Among the most closely watched applications of UAPA has been the Bhima Koregaon case, in which multiple activists and academics were arrested in 2018 in connection with alleged links to banned organisations and an alleged plot, with several of the accused held in extended pre-trial detention well before any conviction, a pattern that became a specific focus of criticism after activist Stan Swamy, one of the accused, died in custody in 2021 while still awaiting trial, a case that has become a frequently cited reference point in broader debates about UAPA’s bail provisions and pre-trial detention periods.

The Umar Khalid Case

Former student activist Umar Khalid has remained under prosecution in the 2020 Delhi riots “larger conspiracy” case for an extended period, with the Supreme Court Observer maintaining a dedicated tracker specifically following his bail applications given the case’s prominence. According to News on Air’s coverage, the Supreme Court declined to grant bail to Khalid and fellow accused Sharjeel Imam in January 2026, with Khalid subsequently withdrawing his bail plea from the Supreme Court after the matter faced 14 separate adjournments, according to further Deccan Herald reporting, a prolonged legal process that has itself become part of the broader public debate around how UAPA cases proceed through the courts.

The Newsclick Case

A more recent high-profile instance involved Newsclick founder Prabir Purkayastha, arrested in October 2023 under UAPA over allegations involving Chinese funding of the news outlet. The Supreme Court subsequently ordered his release in May 2024, ruling that his arrest had been procedurally illegal, according to coverage by Al Jazeera and News on Air, a significant judicial check on how the law’s arrest procedures had been applied in that specific case, even though the underlying substantive allegations against Newsclick remained a separate, ongoing matter beyond the specific procedural violation the court identified.

The Government’s Defence of the Law

The government has consistently defended UAPA’s expanded powers as necessary given the genuine, serious national security threats the law is designed to address, arguing that terrorism-related investigations often require different evidentiary and procedural standards than ordinary criminal cases specifically because of the scale of harm terrorist activity can cause and the practical difficulty of building conventional evidence against organised, often covert terrorist networks, a justification that acknowledges the low conviction rate while arguing it partly reflects the genuinely difficult evidentiary standard terrorism prosecutions require rather than necessarily reflecting overuse of the law itself.

Why the Low Conviction Rate Is Itself Contested

The specific interpretation of UAPA’s low conviction statistics has itself become a point of genuine disagreement: civil liberties advocates argue the gap between arrests and convictions demonstrates the law is being used more as a tool of prolonged pre-trial detention than genuine prosecution, since UAPA’s own stringent bail provisions make it considerably harder for the accused to secure release while a case remains pending, meaning even an eventual acquittal or case dismissal follows what can be years of custody, while the government’s position holds that low conviction rates in terrorism-related cases specifically reflect the genuinely higher evidentiary bar such prosecutions require rather than indicating the underlying arrests themselves were unjustified.

Bottom Line

The 2019 UAPA amendment expanded the law’s terrorist-designation power from organisations to individuals, a change critics argue broadened the state’s discretionary power to label dissenters as terrorists, with independent data consistently showing conviction rates below 2 percent across multiple tracking periods, a gap illustrated by prominent cases including Bhima Koregaon’s extended pre-trial detentions, Umar Khalid’s still-unresolved multi-year prosecution, and Newsclick founder Prabir Purkayastha’s Supreme Court-ordered release over procedural violations, even as the government has consistently defended the law’s necessity given the genuine national security threats it is designed to address.

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Abhyudaya Verma