British Sikh man granted bail after nine years in Indian detention

Jagtar Singh Johal was taken from a car in Jalandhar, Punjab, on a November afternoon in 2017. Three weeks after his wedding, he and his wife were shopping with a relative when men pulled him from the vehicle, covered his head with a black hood, and drove him away in an unmarked car. He was 29 years old. He would not walk free for nine years.

Johal, a British Sikh from Scotland, had traveled to India to marry his fiancée. The arrest came without warning or explanation. He claims he was denied access to a lawyer and tortured in custody in an attempt to force a confession. The charges against him alleged he had funded the Khalistan Liberation Force, a group accused of carrying out targeted killings in Punjab. A question that has never been fully answered: whether British intelligence services provided a tip-off that led to his detention.

For nearly a decade, the case moved through Indian courts with a pattern that became familiar to his family. Hearings were repeatedly deferred. The prosecution failed to produce verifiable evidence. When charges were tested in court, judges found them wanting. In Punjab last year, a court dismissed similar conspiracy charges against him entirely. Yet the federal case in Delhi continued, stalled and unresolved, while Johal remained imprisoned.

On Friday, a Delhi court granted him bail. The decision came after what his brother Gurpreet Singh Johal described as "an expensive rollercoaster, contesting bails at the supreme court and back to the high court." Gurpreet, who lives in Dumbarton, Scotland, alongside Jagtar's wife, said he had spent a sleepless night waiting for the ruling. "Now, all I can think about is Jagtar walking out of prison," he told reporters. "We have waited so long and fought so hard for this moment."

But the path to freedom remained uncertain. While the court ordered Johal's release on bail, he remained in custody as judges determined what conditions would be attached to that bail and what sums of money would need to be posted as bond. His lawyers said they were still awaiting details of what would happen next. The conditions, legal observers noted, were likely to be stringent.

The case had drawn attention from human rights organizations and from successive British foreign secretaries, who acknowledged publicly that it had dragged on far too long. Yet they had been reluctant to call directly for his release, citing a principle of non-interference in another country's judiciary. The UK government recently appointed Alistair Burt as a special envoy for complex consular cases, and he met with Gurpreet Johal in Scotland to discuss the matter.

Dan Dolan, deputy executive director of Reprieve, one of the organizations fighting for Johal's release, cautioned that the bail order must actually be implemented. "We must watch closely to ensure this order is actually implemented and not obstructed in any way," he said. He also noted that Johal still faces the death penalty in eight remaining cases against him, despite those cases essentially duplicating charges on which he has already been acquitted.

Chris Esdaile, a senior legal adviser to Redress, another organization representing Johal, said the bail grant "can't undo the intolerable suffering caused by nine years of arbitrary detention." He emphasized that accountability for the allegations of torture and the deeply flawed proceedings remains urgent. Gurpreet Johal echoed this sentiment: his brother "won't be truly free until he is back in Dumbarton, with his wife and family."