The Supreme Court judgment in Mulla Afroz v. Union of India, delivered on 29 Sep. 2026, exposes a disturbing exercise of State power: a man who had secured bail in every criminal case arising from an incident was nevertheless kept in detention under the National Security Act (NSA). The Court quashed his detention and ordered Uttar Pradesh to pay him ₹10 lakh in costs. What the apex court concluded was stark: “The process was made the punishment.”
The judgment raises a question far beyond one individual: can an administration, unable to justify continued custody through ordinary criminal proceedings, use preventive detention to achieve substantially the same result?
Administrative Power Without Adequate Justification
Violence broke out in Sambhal on 24 Nov. 2024, during a survey of a mosque. The incident led to the cases involving Mulla Afroz. Four people died. Mulla Afroz was not named in the initial FIR. He was arrested on 17 Jan. 2025, around 54 days after the incident, and implicated in several cases.
On 13 Oct. 2025, while he was in judicial custody, the District Magistrate ordered his detention under the NSA. The State confirmed the order on 28 Nov. for a further period of 12 months. Afroz challenged the detention, alleging that a confession had been extracted through threats and torture. The Allahabad High Court dismissed his petition on 8 June 2026, accepting the administration’s justification. By June 2026, however, Afroz had secured bail in all the criminal cases arising from the incident. He remained detained under the NSA.
The Supreme Court found that the administration had relied substantially on the same incident and overlapping material for both criminal prosecution and preventive detention. It held that the alleged police confession could not, by itself and without independent supporting material, sustain preventive detention. It also found that the distinction between punitive and preventive powers had become blurred.
The State had to demonstrate a genuine need to prevent future prejudicial conduct, not merely reinforce allegations already being pursued through criminal cases. It had failed to maintain that distinction. The Court therefore set aside both the Allahabad High Court judgment and the detention orders, directing Afroz’s release unless required in another case. It imposed ₹10 lakh in costs on the State.
Importantly, the Court did not declare Afroz innocent of the criminal allegations. Those proceedings remain independent. Its ruling concerned the legality of his preventive detention.
The administrative failure is nevertheless unmistakable. The District Magistrate authorised detention on legally inadequate material; the State confirmed it; and the High Court upheld it. It took the Supreme Court to correct the course after Afroz had already lost a considerable period of liberty. The award of costs was more than a technical consequence: it placed a financial burden on the State for an unlawful exercise of power.
The Human Cost of Incarceration
For the person detained, constitutional violations are not abstract. They mean months or years away from family, lost employment, mounting legal expenses and a stigma that may survive even acquittal. For families with limited means, incarceration can destroy livelihoods and deprive children of a parent’s care.
India’s prison statistics underline the scale of the problem. According to the NCRB’s Prison Statistics India 2024, the country had 3,71,440 undertrial prisoners. Muslims accounted for 69,864, or 18.81 per cent, despite comprising approximately 14.2 per cent of the population. Their share has declined over two decades, but the disparity remains significant. These figures do not establish that every accused person is innocent or falsely implicated. They do, however, demand scrutiny of arrest practices, access to bail and the unequal burdens of criminal proceedings.
An undertrial is not a convicted criminal. Yet when a case takes years to conclude, imprisonment can become punishment in practice, even when guilt has not been proved in law. The presumption of innocence offers little comfort to someone who loses the most productive years of life waiting for a verdict.
When Justice Arrives Too Late
The 2008 Jaipur serial-blast case illustrates the grave consequences of investigative failure and prolonged prosecution. Four men – Mohammad Saif, Mohammad Sarwar Azmi, Saifurrehman and Mohammad Salman – were sentenced to death in 2019. In March 2023, the Rajasthan High Court acquitted all four in the principal blasts case, condemning the investigation as a ‘botched’ exercise and pointing to institutional failure. The prosecution had failed to establish crucial links in its account, including the accused’s alleged journey from Delhi to Jaipur and their role in making and planting the bombs.
Equally disturbing was the passage of nearly 15 years before the principal case reached this outcome. Such a prolonged prosecution raises serious questions about investigative competence, prosecutorial responsibility and the accountability of officials who pursued allegations that ultimately failed judicial scrutiny. The accused lost years of their lives, while the machinery of justice took years to expose the deficiencies in the case. Who will answer for that lost time?
The legal ordeal did not end there. A separate case concerning an unexploded bomb near Chandpole Temple continued, resulting in the subsequent conviction of three of these men and another accused in 2025. That separate outcome must be acknowledged; it does not, however, erase the High Court’s findings concerning the failures in the principal blasts investigation. The larger lesson remains: the gravity of an accusation cannot substitute for evidence, and the State must be held accountable when investigative and prosecutorial failures deprive people of liberty for years.
Similarly, in July 2025, the Bombay High Court acquitted 12 surviving accused in the 2006 Mumbai train-blast case after nearly 19 years. One accused had died in prison in 2021.
These cases must be judged on their individual evidence; acquittal alone does not prove deliberate fabrication. But they expose the grave consequences when investigations and prosecutions fail after years of incarceration. A later acquittal cannot restore lost time, rebuild a ruined career or erase the suffering of families.
The State must therefore answer for more than the final outcome of a case. It must be accountable for the quality of its investigation, the legality of detention and the consequences of keeping people imprisoned without a timely determination of guilt.
The Constitutional Boundary
Articles 14 and 21 guarantee equality before the law and protection of life and personal liberty. Article 22 provides safeguards against arbitrary detention. These provisions lose their meaning if administrative authorities can invoke extraordinary powers without adequately establishing their necessity.
Preventive detention may be lawful in exceptional circumstances. But it cannot be used as a substitute for prosecution, a means of neutralising bail or a device for prolonging custody when the ordinary criminal process does not justify it.
The lesson of Afroz’s case is not merely that one detention order was unlawful. It is that several layers of administration and judicial review failed to prevent an unjustified deprivation of liberty. Effective accountability requires rigorous scrutiny before detention, meaningful remedies when the law is violated, and professional investigations that withstand judicial examination.
A constitutional democracy cannot measure justice simply by how many people it arrests or how firmly it asserts public order. It must also ask whether its power is exercised lawfully, and what happens to the people when it is not.
Prevention may be constitutionally permissible; punishment without conviction isn’t. When the process itself becomes the punishment, the State has failed its most basic constitutional duty.