Free to Leave Prison, Not to Leave India

He can walk out of prison, but he cannot leave India, and he cannot talk about why. ¹

That is the shape of freedom granted this month to Jagtar Singh Johal, the Scottish activist held in Indian custody for nearly nine years without a conviction and still facing the possibility of execution. ¹ The Delhi High Court granted him bail in September 2026 on a bond of nearly £4,000, on condition that he surrender his passport and make no public statements. ¹ He was arrested on 4 November 2017 in Jalandhar, Punjab, and has been in custody ever since. ¹

The bail changes where he sleeps, not how he is charged. ¹ Johal, a British citizen who has maintained his innocence throughout, remains charged in eight separate cases, and the death penalty is still described as a live possibility against him. ¹ There is no suggestion in the public account that the bail acquits him, reduces the charges, or removes that ultimate risk. ¹ It is, in the narrowest legal sense, a decision about custody while the cases continue, not a judgment on whether those cases should exist at all. ¹

What makes the continued jeopardy harder to read is that the two sides do not even agree on what the eight cases are. ¹ India's counterterrorism agency insists he has been formally charged in all eight, each one legitimate and standing on its own. ¹ His legal team argues the opposite — that the remaining cases are duplicates, stacked versions of the same accusation designed to keep him held even if any single case fails. ¹ On the evidence made public so far, that contradiction has never been reconciled in open court. ¹

Only one of the cases has ever been fully tested, and it collapsed. ¹ In March 2025, Johal was acquitted in one of the cases after a judge found that the prosecution had miserably failed on evidence. ¹ The language matters because it was not a technical acquittal or a procedural reprieve; it was a court looking at the state's evidence and finding it wanting. ¹ That is why the acquittal is now being read in some quarters not as an outlier but as a narrowing of the prosecution's case — the single documented instance where the charges were put to proof and did not hold up. ¹

Arrest in 2017, acquittal in early 2025, political pressure that spring, and bail this month: that is the whole arc. ¹ The political pressure came in May 2025, when more than 100 cross-party MPs signed a letter to then Foreign Secretary David Lammy pressing for action on Johal's behalf. ¹ Separately, UN-appointed legal experts called for the charges to be dropped, describing the detention as a profound miscarriage of justice. ¹ Together those interventions framed the detention as no longer a routine consular case but a detention whose legitimacy had been questioned by lawmakers at home and by international lawyers abroad. ¹

What that pressure produced, on the public record, was thin. ¹ The UK Foreign Office has responded only with a statement of continued engagement with the case, a formulation that says attention without saying action. ¹ It leaves unanswered the practical questions that matter to a family that has spent most of a decade campaigning for a return: what the British government has actually done, what it is doing now that bail has been granted, and whether it will press for permission for Johal to come home to Scotland. ¹ A man who spent nearly nine years in a foreign prison without a conviction now needs the diplomatic machinery that has so far produced only a line about engagement to deliver something more substantial. ¹

The conditions attached to the bail carry their own weight, and they need to be read plainly. ¹ Surrendering a passport to a court in the country that detained you is not a mild administrative step; it is a mechanism that can keep a person in place even as he is nominally free. ¹ And the condition against making public statements restricts precisely the thing an activist accused in a politically charged prosecution would most need to do: speak for himself. ¹ He can leave the prison building, but he cannot leave India, and he cannot explain himself in public. ¹ That is the sharp edge of the release — freedom bounded by the same state that held him. ¹

The human cost of the nine years is not abstract. ¹ A man from Scotland has spent most of a decade in foreign custody facing possible execution, separated from a family that has campaigned for his return through every stage. ¹ The acquittal in one case and the bail in the others are, after all that time, the first real indications that the case against him may be weaker than the state has portrayed it. ¹ But the fact that release after nine years comes only on condition that he cannot talk and cannot travel shows how narrow the concession really is. ¹

The central unresolved question is the one the bail leaves hanging: will Johal be permitted to leave India and return to Scotland, or does the passport surrender make this at best a change in the form of his confinement? ¹ Tied to that is the fate of the remaining cases — whether the duplicate-case argument his legal team advances will ever be tested in court, or whether a man acquitted in one case will simply be held indefinitely under the rest. ¹ The death penalty question compounds it, because none of the public reporting establishes whether execution has been formally sought in any specific case or against which ones. ¹

This account rests on a single report by Channel 4 News on 18 September 2026, with no independent corroboration of the figures or details as of airing. ¹ What the bail has produced is movement in a nearly decade-long stalemate, and the next signal to watch is whether India's courts and the UK Foreign Office convert that movement into an actual pathway home. ¹