The Supreme Court on Monday reminded Delhi police that the accused in the Delhi riots larger conspiracy case have spent five years behind bars, asking why the agency had failed to file its response to their bail pleas.

The bail pleas of JNU scholar and activist Umar Khaled, Sharjeel Imam and others will now be heard on Friday, 31 October.

When the matter came up for hearing before a bench of Justice Aravind Kumar and Justice N.V. Anjaria, additional solicitor general of India S.V. Raju appealed for two weeks to submit the state’s response.

“You [ASG] may be appearing for first time. We granted sufficient time,” the bench told Raju, as reported by legal news websites covering the hearing live. “Frankly speaking in bail matters there is no question of filing counter.”

“On Friday, you ensure you have proper instructions…. We will hear it…. See if something can be done…. This is only about consideration of bail…. See five years are over already,” the court said.

Delhi High Court had this month rejected the bail pleas of Khalid and Imam in the 2020 Delhi riots larger conspiracy case.

Fifty three people died and over hundred injured in the Delhi riots of February 2020.

Last month Khalid had spent his 38th birthday, the fifth one behind bars, at the high security Tihar jail.

“When the matter is about delay, we should not delay it more,” said senior counsel Abhishek Manu Singhvi in Monday’s hearing.

In September 2020 Umar – who did his PhD on ‘Contesting claims and contingencies of the rule on Adivasis of Jharkhand’ from JNU (which had initially refused to accept the thesis and did so only after repeated snubbing by the court in 2018) – was arrested by the Delhi police, accused of being the “key conspirator” in the Delhi riots of 2020 that happened in the national capital and left 53 killed following months of massive protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Registry of Citizens.

He was the last among the 20 people arrested by the Delhi police, including Sharjeel Imam, one of the spearheads of the Shaheen Bagh protests against the citizenship law, the rules of which were framed ahead of the Lok Sabha polls by the Narendra Modi government.