This is the first article in The Wire’s series ‘The Forced Guilt Project', supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

Mumbai: On March 21, 2025, Union home minister Amit Shah, accompanied by other Members of Parliament  from his ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), stood triumphantly on the floor of the upper house of parliament. In his over-two-hour-long speech, Shah showcased his government’s progress in “tackling terrorism” in the country.

Among many achievements, Shah spoke in great detail about the National Investigation Agency (NIA)’s successful track record in both registering cases and securing convictions in court. He attributed the agency’s success to Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s “zero tolerance” policy toward terrorism. “The NIA has proven itself to be the best among all anti-terror organisations that exist globally,” he claimed.

His speech drew upon the NIA’s own announcement three months earlier, on December 31, 2024. In its “year-end” press release, the agency boasted of a 100% conviction rate for 2024, an amazing achievement even by the 15-year-old agency’s already impressive standards. Till then, the NIA had managed a conviction rate of ‘only’ 94–95%. The widely covered press statement highlighted the fact that the agency, established specifically to combat the threat of terrorism in the country, had secured convictions in 25 cases that year.

An agency that grows and grows

The NIA was set up less than a month after the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks, which killed 166 people and left over three hundred injured. The then Union home minister, P. Chidambaram, had pushed to get the necessary authorisation passed by Parliament. When the NIA Bill came up for debate in the Rajya Sabha, it was met with a few dissenting voices, including that of Sitaram Yechury of the Communist Party of India (Marxist). Yechury, concerned about the erosion of the principles of federalism, suggested an amendment to make the association of state governments mandatory in the investigation and trial of offences.

Chidambaram’s response was dismissive. “People are looking at us. As I speak today, people are watching us. People will watch us on television tomorrow. People are asking, ‘Is this the Parliament of India the sentinel on TV? Is the Parliament of India an appropriate sentinel to guard our liberty?’” Without adequate discussion, the Bill was cleared four days after its introduction.

Within months – according to  a confidential US State Department cable accessed by The Hindu through Wikileaks – Chidambaram was confiding to a top-ranking US official that the law’s powers could be challenged in the courts as violating constitutional provisions on Centre-state relations.

Those fears, it turned out, were completely unfounded. In the past decade and a half, the NIA has carried on without constitutional challenges. In fact, its underlying Act  has been further expanded, signalling a significant shift in the Indian state’s approach to internal security and centralised counterterrorism efforts.

Just like the investigating agency, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, under which the NIA prosecutes cases, has also undergone several amendments – four times before the NIA was formed and three times (in 2008, 2012 and 2019) since then. The 2019 amendment expanded the scope of cases involving explosives and brought hijacking under the NIA’s purview. Crimes such as human trafficking and counterfeit currency offences, which were until then dealt with under the Indian Penal Code and The Immoral Traffic (Prevention) Act, now made their way into the NIA law. The law also includes cyber terrorism and offences relating to arms smuggling after the 2019 amendment. The agency’s jurisdiction, earlier restricted to Indians, was further amended in 2019 to probe terror attacks targeting Indians and Indian interests abroad.

From its headquarters in New Delhi, the NIA now operates two zonal offices in Guwahati and Jammu and 21 branch offices nationwide, with 13 branches and both zonal offices established in the last five years alone. This growth is mirrored by its legal infrastructure, with 51 special courts designated for NIA cases, including two exclusively for the agency in Ranchi and Jammu. The agency’s sanctioned personnel surged by about 33% in the same period from 1,237 to 1,901, with its budget ballooning 3,183%, from Rs 12.09 crore in 2009-10 to Rs 394.66 crore in 2024-25.

Among the Union government’s investigative agencies such as the Enforcement Directorate (ED) and Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), the NIA stands out for its consistent courtroom victories.

But what drives the NIA’s unparalleled success even while others have shown embarrassing signs of failure? Are its high conviction rates achieved by diligent and painstaking investigation and evidence gathering, combined with rigorous adherence to due process, or do they reveal something more troubling?

The answers to these questions become evident through a clear pattern observed in the agency's handling of its cases. For nearly two years now, The Wire has analysed NIA data, as published on its website,  from its inception through to September 2025. A distinct trend emerges.

A slow start

After the NIA began registering cases in 2009, trials did not commence for the first six to seven years, except in a few cases. The restrictive bail clause, Section 43 D(5), introduced in the UAPA in 2008, making it virtually impossible for an accused person to be released on bail, ensured that those accused remained in jail during this time.

Despite this section, however, some higher court judges tended to maintain a liberal approach towards the granting of bail. This changed with the Supreme Court’s 2019 judgment in National Investigation Agency vs Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali, where the apex court declared that bail could  be granted if and only if a finding is recorded that the chargesheet is "prima facie not true".

The Watali judgement, criminal lawyer Nihalsingh Rathod says, interpreted the UAPA’s restrictive bail provisions in such a way that “while considering a plea for bail, courts are bound to find that there is no prima facie true case, while also accepting the material in the chargesheet as true”. “This,” he says, “places the accused in a disadvantageous position as they must demonstrate, using the prosecution’s own material, that the accusations are not true, without being able to rely on any defence material.” So the bail parameters are set akin to parameters of discharge, “although the court says it is not the same as discharge,” Rathod adds. Delhi-based lawyer Abhinav Sekhri says it is like asking a person to swim after throwing him in deep water with both his hands tied behind him.

A subsequent judgment, K.A. Najeeb (2021), offered some hope, but here too the Supreme Court’s interpretation of “inordinate delay” and “reasonable time” has not been fully embraced, leading to bail denials both before trial courts and at the high court level, until the accused has spent a significant number of years in custody. And this “significant number” is open to the court’s interpretation. In the Elgar Parishad case, for instance, the Bombay high court said Delhi University professor Hany Babu M.T., who had spent over four and a half years in prison, would get bail only after five years, deeming it the threshold for “inordinate delay”.

Once booked and jailed under the UAPA, a person faces prolonged pretrial detention. These detentions in many cases have stretched for close to ten years and in a few cases, even crossed the 14-year mark – a period constituting a “life term” under Indian law. For example, several Muslim men arrested since 2008 in multiple cases for their alleged involvement in the home-grown terror group Indian Mujahideen are still awaiting trial. Many of them, charged in multiple cases across the country, simply get shifted from one jail to another. Despite directions from the Supreme Court and high courts to lower courts to conclude the trials in a time-bound manner, these trials have barely made a headstart.

Guilty pleas: Justice or coercion?

The Wire’s investigation reveals that prolonged detentions, coupled with near-certain bail denials, often push accused individuals to plead guilty. This move is not necessarily an outcome of “guilt” in many of these situations, but a desperate attempt to escape from an interminable legal process.

As per the data made available on the NIA website (as of December 9, 2025), of the 633 cases registered by the NIA since its inception to September 30, 2025, verdicts have so far been delivered in 133 , just one fifth of the total cases registered in 15 years.

However, the data provided by the NIA spokesperson to The Wire in response to our questions shows that a total of 696 cases were registered up to November 30, 2025, of which 172 have been disposed of. The spokesperson said a further break-up of the data was not available with him at present.

There is no way to determine whether the additional cases were all registered in the two-month period between October and November 2025, or whether the figures on the website are incorrect. For this investigative series, The Wire has relied on the case data published on the NIA website.

Of these 133 cases, The Wire has found that the agency conducted a full trial, with proper examination of witnesses and presentation of evidence, in only 79 cases. Some of those ended in conviction and some acquittals. Further breakdown of this data, however, became impossible because the NIA, which earlier used to upload judgments on its website, suddenly decided to discontinue the practice, and even the older judgments have been removed from the website. Similarly, district court websites in most states no longer upload judgments in NIA cases.

Terror cases, by their very nature, have multiple accused persons. In most cases, the agency managed only partial success with convictions of a few of the total accused put to trial.

In the remaining 54 cases, the defendants opted for guilty pleas. This means the agency secured convictions in more than 40% of its cases through guilty pleas.

In 49 of these 54 NIA cases when conviction rested on guilty pleas, the accused were Muslim. During its reporting for this series, The Wire interviewed a large number of individuals across the country and found that the men disproportionately come from “lower” Muslim castes, an important indicator that is missing from the National Crime Report Bureau data, released annually.

For close to two years, we analysed NIA case details from its website, court records and interviews with lawyers and defendants. Our investigation reveals that guilty pleas are often coerced, offered as the only path to freedom after years of detention. In many cases, accused individuals plead guilty not because they committed the crime but to end their ordeal, with sentences often matching or falling below time already served.

The NIA, however, denies having any role in the process. “When an accused person decides to plead guilty, the entire process is then only between him and the judge. The prosecution has no role in the process,” the NIA’s spokesperson, who declined to be named or identified by rank, told The Wire. He cited section 229 of the Criminal Procedure Code (CrPC) to make his point. “The section clearly states that if the accused person pleads guilty, the judge will record the plea. When there is no role assigned to the prosecution, we have no business to interfere,” the spokesperson said.

The NIA also claimed that they come to know about the accused person’s decision only through the court and sometimes after the court has already accepted the application as it is the discretion of the court. This claim, however, might not always be true considering that both the NIA’s officials and the prosecution are invariably present in the court for the hearing.

How plead guilty and plea bargaining came to be used interchangeably by the NIA

The terms “pleading guilty” and “plea bargaining” are often conflated, but they are distinct under Indian law. Pleading guilty involves admitting guilt without guaranteed leniency, while plea bargaining, which was introduced through an amendment to the Criminal Law Act in 2005 (as defined under Sections 265A–265J of the CrPC) allows negotiation for reduced charges or sentences. Plea bargaining is restricted to offences punishable only up to seven years’ imprisonment and explicitly excludes serious crimes like those under UAPA, which the NIA typically prosecutes.

Plea bargains didn’t have an easy passage. Early Supreme Court rulings like Kasambhai Shaikh and Ganeshmal Jashraj (1980) condemned plea bargaining as “unconstitutional and coercive”. Even in Sukhdeo Singh (1992), which allowed guilty pleas after charges are framed, the court stressed on voluntariness and informed consent. It recognised that the application of a plea bargaining framework is shaped less by principled legal reasoning and more by selective and arbitrary state control.

After 2005, however, courts changed their outlook. In Natwar Thakor (2005), the Supreme Court recognised the utility of plea bargaining, urging case-by-case evaluation. More recently, in the In Re: Policy Strategy for Grant of Bail case, the court endorsed limited post-conviction pleas for sentence reduction, provided guilt is admitted solely to expedite closure without affecting appeals.

Despite the existing legal limitations on plea bargaining, The Wire’s investigation shows many accused persons, worn down by years of detention and slim chances of bail, often plead guilty not as a strategic choice but out of desperation. In at least seven cases, individuals endured incarceration far exceeding their final sentences.

Judiciary’s role

The judiciary's handling of guilty pleas in NIA cases also reveals a worrying pattern. In many cases that The Wire studied, the plead guilty applications and corresponding judgments appear formulaic. These critical legal aspects have long escaped both state and judicial scrutiny.

In several cases, despite accused individuals pleading guilty, often expecting leniency, trial courts have imposed harsh punishments such as life imprisonment. Higher courts have criticised these decisions, citing misuse of guilty pleas, lack of due process and failure to consider reformative approaches, especially for young accused persons without prior records. Some convictions were overturned, highlighting unconstitutional practices in accepting pleas without proper legal representation or factual inquiry.

In the series that follows, The Wire will delve into the world of guilty pleas before NIA courts: who pleads guilty, why, and what happens next.

Note: The Wire sent a long questionnaire to the NIA on November 21. A senior NIA PRO called back on November 24, asking the reporter to meet him and another colleague at the NIA office in Talkatora in New Delhi. On December 3, the two officials met two of The Wire’s journalists – Sukanya Shantha and Jahnavi Sen – for over an hour and a half, and responded to some of the questions. The senior official also requested a playback of the quotes that would be used. This was done. On December 8, the official asked that he and his colleagues not be identified by their names or designations.

With inputs from Saranga Ugalmugle.

This article went live on December tenth, two thousand twenty five, at zero minutes past eight in the morning.

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