Quratulain RehbarOn July 21, it was raining in Mumbai when Abdul Wahid Shaikh, 47, walked into the city’s High Court – not to fight for his own freedom, but for twelve other men he once shared a prison cell with.
That rainy morning, Shaikh stood in the packed courtroom as judges declared the remaining men “innocent”. The verdict ended nearly two decades of imprisonment for the accused.
Shaikh, a schoolteacher, was one of thirteen men originally accused in the charges of coordinated attacks in the 2006 Mumbai train bombings. Seven bombs had exploded within minutes on commuter trains during the evening rush hour, killing more than 187 people and injuring 800.
Shaikh spent nine years behind bars before being acquitted in 2015. When reporters outside asked how it felt, he told them: “We have always said we are innocent.”
He says that he watched the others break down in tears when they heard the judgment, their sobs echoing through the courtroom. “I also could not control my emotions. I went out, prayed and thanked God,” Shaikh tells TRT World.
The verdict overturned a 2015 ruling by a special court that sentenced five men to death and seven to life.
But the high court ruled the police had tortured suspects and fabricated evidence, “creating a false appearance of having solved a case.”
However, on July 24, India’s Supreme Court stayed the acquittal, ruling that the high court’s findings must not be treated as a precedent while the Maharashtra government’s appeal is heard. The top court, though, said the freed people would not have to “go back to prison”.
Legal experts say the acquittals expose systemic flaws in how terror cases are investigated and the devastating cost of those failures.
“The high court raised serious questions about the police investigation, dismissed the evidence as unreliable and acquitted everyone,” Lara Jesani, human rights lawyer, tells TRT World.
“The question is: how did the special court overlook all of this while convicting the accused and sentencing several of them to death?”
According to Apoorvanand Jha, a professor at Delhi University and political commentator, such prejudice “influences not just how crimes are investigated but also how the public perceives the accused.”
“Instead of solving the crime,” he tells TRT World, “the system often looks for people it knows the public will easily believe are guilty. And why does the public accept it? Because there is already a mindset that Muslims can do it. There’s social approval for these narratives, so they keep getting repeated.”
So far, no senior BJP leader of the current ruling dispensation has directly reacted in detail to the acquittals.
Deliberate error in judgment?
In its September 2015 verdict, the special court upheld the Anti Terrorism Squad’s (ATS) claim that the 12 accused were members of the banned outfit, Students' Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), and were linked to the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) terrorist outfit.
The court sentenced five of the men to death and seven to life imprisonment. One of the accused, Kamal Ansari, died of Covid in prison in 2021. Police allege that Ansari had received arms training in Pakistan, ferried two Pakistani militants across the Indo-Nepal border, and planted the bomb that exploded at Matunga station.
However, the high court noted that the prosecution failed to even bring on record the type of bombs used in the crime and that the evidence relied on by it was not conclusive to convict the accused persons.
Jesani tells TRT World that acknowledging the miscarriage of justice isn’t enough.
“There has to be justice and accountability. How will the police officers be held responsible? What about compensatory justice for the accused? How do you even begin to measure what is enough compensation when their entire lives have been turned upside down? Unless there is exemplary action, wrongful arrests will keep happening without consequences.”
Pattern beyond terrorism charges
Abdul Wahid Shaikh, also known as Wahid Deen Mohammad Shaikh, began working as a primary school teacher after his acquittal. He has since published his PhD on the literature of political prisoners before and after Partition in the Indian subcontinent.
Despite being highly educated, Shaikh said he and his family were stigmatised for years because of the terrorism charges. Even after his acquittal in 2015, some relatives kept their distance.
“When I came out and the others were still in prison, some people still stayed away from me. I hope this time they will accept the truth and not look at us with stigma anymore,” he adds.
Even after his acquittal, a 2019 official notification extending the ban on SIMI named him as an accused in the train blasts. Only after filing a petition in Delhi High Court was his name removed. But he said the harassment continued and he wrote to the National Human Rights Commission in 2019 about it. He said he received a response only in 2022.
The Mumbai train blasts case isn’t an isolated instance.
Across India, courts have overturned numerous terrorism-related convictions involving Muslims, often years, or decades, after the damage was done.
For example, in Gujarat, a court in 2021 acquitted 127 people who had been arrested in 2001 at a student meeting and charged under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA) for alleged links and promoting the banned group SIMI.
The judge said the prosecution failed to produce “reliable and satisfactory” evidence to prove any wrongdoing.
Analysts say this pattern reflects how anti-Muslim suspicion became embedded in India’s security and political systems after 9/11, and how it has endured under successive governments.
“After 9/11, anti-Muslim suspicion became institutionalised, policing based on identity and ideology rather than solid evidence became the norm,” says Asim Ali, a policy analyst, in an interview with TRT World.
He adds: “Investigative and intelligence agencies often operate without being answerable to anyone, not even Parliament. There’s no strong framework to hold them accountable.”
The pattern extends beyond terror cases.
In 2020, during India’s first wave of Covid-19, the Muslim missionary group Tablighi Jamaat was subjected to a nationwide witch hunt. Police filed hundreds of FIRs against its members for allegedly violating pandemic rules and spreading the virus.
More than five years later, on July 17, 2025, the Delhi High Court quashed 16 FIRs and charge sheets involving 70 Indian citizens. Back then, over 2,000 people had attended the gathering, and as Covid cases rose, they were branded “super-spreaders” and targeted with hate.
News channels and social media influencers coined the term “Corona Jihad,”framing the gathering as an act of biological warfare by Muslims — a phrase that fuelled Islamophobic hate and deepened communal divides in the middle of a pandemic.
The High Court found that the police had no evidence. All sixteen charge sheets were dismissed.
No compensation big enough
Political analysts say the case reflects a deeper, more pervasive bias that shapes how Muslims are treated by police, courts, and media alike.
Speaking of the 12 men recently acquitted, Jha adds: “We pointed out the holes in the police story from the beginning but were not heard. If those who carried out flawed investigations are not held responsible and made to compensate for the loss, 19 years of people’s lives, this will keep happening.”
The High Court ruling has raised fresh questions about whether India’s security agencies and courts will face real pressure to change the way they handle terror cases, particularly those involving minorities.
But Asim Ali says that conversation has yet to begin. “No political party has publicly acknowledged that what happened in this case, where twelve men were acquitted after nearly two decades in prison, was wrong,” he adds.
“At the political level, there is no conversation about the need for accountability or reform. And in public discourse, the idea that there’s bias in policing or intelligence work is still seen as a marginal, fringe opinion.”
Outside the courtroom, Wahid Shaikh distributed boxes of mithai (Indian sweets) to the friends and lawyers who never stopped believing him.
But, he said, the sweetness was tempered by sorrow. “It was a heart-wrenching day, bittersweet in every sense.”
