India, May 26 -- For a long time, it has been clear that there is something fundamentally broken about the operation of the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act (UAPA). Ostensibly designed to effectively prosecute people accused of terrorist offences, the Act has, instead, become a tool for indefinite pre-trial incarceration of people against whom no charges have been proven.

Two things contribute to this.

The first is the general malaise of India's criminal justice system, where criminal trials take years (or even decades) to complete. There are structural reasons for this, which we cannot enter into here.

The second is that the UAPA sets the threshold for the grant of bail extremely high, requiring judges to deny bail if they feel that...