When the Indian Armed Forces struck targets in Pakistan and Pakistan-occupied Kashmir in the early hours of May 7, 2025 under Operation Sindoor, few imagined that the deepest jurisprudential afterlife of those four days would unfold not in international law journals but in bail orders of Indian courts.
Yet, a year on, the language of “war,” “national crisis” and the citizen’s “duty” has steadily migrated from press briefings into judicial reasoning - sometimes loudly, sometimes by stealth - and the constitutional cost is becoming visible.
This article maps that migration. It looks at the cluster of cases born directly out of Operation Sindoor - FIRs against academics, satirists, students and alleged spies - and asks whether the framing of national security has become not merely contextual but a substantive ingredient of judicial decision-making.
The Indian Supreme Court’s instinct in wartime has historically been deferential, though never uniformly so. During the Sino-Indian war emergency, the five-judge Bench in Makhan Singh v. State of Punjab (1964) upheld the Presidential Order under Article 359 barring courts from entertaining challenges to detentions under the Defence of India Rules. Three years later, in State of MP v. Bharat Singh (1967), the same Court held that the Emergency did not authorise the executive to act without statutory backing - an early reminder that “national emergency” was not a constitutional black hole. ADM Jabalpur (1976), the now-discredited Habeas Corpus case, marked the low point: a 4:1 majority held that during a proclaimed Emergency, no person could move any court for enforcement of Article 21 - a holding overruled fifty years later in Puttaswamy (2017).
In the post-Emergency era, the Court adopted a self-consciously balanced register. Kartar Singh v. State of Punjab (1994), upholding TADA, expressly invoked “the doctrine of balancing national security and individual rights,” and conditioned the upholding of stringent procedure on procedural safeguards including advisory boards and review committees. The thread running through this jurisprudence is uneven: deference in moments of acute crisis, calibrated review in their aftermath. Operation Sindoor has thrown that pattern back into the dock.
The case that crystallised the new vocabulary was Ali Khan Mahmudabad’s. The Ashoka University political science professor’s Facebook posts of May 8, 2025 made two arguments: that Operation Sindoor represented a doctrinal shift collapsing the distinction between state and non-state actors in Pakistan, and that public adulation for Colonel Sofiya Qureshi and Wing Commander Vyomika Singh should translate into substantive protection for Indian Muslims against mob violence. Two FIRs followed, invoking Sections 152, 196, 197, 299, 353 and 79 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023.
On May 21, 2025, a Bench of Justices Surya Kant and N Kotiswar Singh granted interim bail. The Court conceded that the post was “anti-war” but characterised Mahmudabad’s prose as “dog whistling” engineered for “cheap popularity”. Justice Surya Kant orally observed:
“Everyone is asking for free speech, where is your duty?…Monsters came and attacked our country.”
The professor was restrained from any further public comment on Pahalgam or the Indian response, ordered to surrender his passport and a three-member SIT was constituted to “holistically understand the complexity of the phraseology employed”.
The order arrived without analysis of which words actually offended any provision of the BNS. As the Supreme Court Observer noted, the 400-word order did not explain the linguistic complexity it claimed to identify. The grant of bail thus rested less on the absence of a prima facie offence than on a calibrated balancing of liberty against perceived insensitivity in a season of war. By July 16, 2025, the same bench chastised the SIT for “misdirecting itself,” telling it tartly that “you don’t require him, you require a dictionary.” On March 16, 2026, after Haryana refused sanction as a “one-time magnanimity,” proceedings were closed. But not before the Court added a “word of caution” to Mahmudabad about writing “between the lines.”
If Mahmudabad illustrates the Supreme Court’s willingness to defer to securitised framing, the Madhya Pradesh High Court’s response to Minister Kunwar Vijay Shah shows a strikingly different judicial register. On May 14, 2025, the Jabalpur Bench of Justices Atul Sreedharan and Anuradha Shukla took suo motu cognisance of video clips in which the Tribal Affairs Minister referred to Colonel Sofiya Qureshi as a “sister of terrorists,” implying that the government had sent “the sister of the same community” to teach terrorists a lesson.
The Court ordered registration of an FIR by that very evening under BNS Sections 152, 196(1)(b) and 197(1)(c), described the language as “of the gutters” and, when the FIR as drafted was found wanting, directed that its entire order be read into paragraph 12 of the FIR. Shah moved the Supreme Court (Justices Surya Kant and Dipankar Datta), which extended interim protection from arrest but transferred proceedings out of the High Court. In May 2026, the apex court, now with CJI Surya Kant presiding, directed the MP government to decide within four weeks on sanction, observing pointedly that Shah “should have apologized immediately”.
The contrast is instructive. The same factual matrix - a public utterance concerning Operation Sindoor - produced an unsparing constitutional response from a High Court and a more procedurally laden response from the Supreme Court.
Below the headlines, State police forces have invoked Section 152 BNS - the successor to colonial-era sedition - with extraordinary liberality. According to NCRB’s Crime in India 2023, registered “sedition” cases stood at just ten nationwide in 2023 (down from twenty in 2022), a figure that vastly understates BNS-era prosecutions for speech, which migrated to Sections 152, 196, 197 and 353.
At the Allahabad High Court, Justice Arun Kumar Singh Deshwal denied bail to one Ashraf Khan alias Nisrat in July 2025 for sharing edited videos of the Prime Minister and Wing Commander Singh, remarking that it had “become a fashion among certain groups of people to misuse social media under the guise of freedom of expression”. Weeks later, Justice Krishan Pahal of the same Court granted bail to a co-accused in the same FIR. In September 2025, Justice Santosh Rai released one Savej, booked for circulating a Pakistan-origin video against the Prime Minister, citing speedy trial and prison overcrowding. The result is a court speaking in multiple voices from within one building.
At the Bombay High Court, in May 2025, Justices Gauri Godse and Somasekhar Sundaresan ordered the immediate release of Khadija Shaikh, a 19-year-old engineering student arrested for an Instagram repost - deleted within two hours - that ended with “Pakistan Zindabad.” The vacation bench called the arrest “absolutely shocking” and observed that the Pune police were “bent upon ruining her life.” Yet, a different bench of the same Court (Justices AS Gadkari and Rajesh Patil) later refused to quash an FIR against Farah Deeba, a Pune teacher who had posted derogatory WhatsApp content, holding that her Master’s degree implied “a duty to act responsibly”.
The framing of national security operates at its strongest in the espionage cluster. The Punjab Police’s most recent assessment puts the figure at 457 Pakistan-linked spies arrested across 17 States and Union Territories since Operation Sindoor. But the courtroom story is markedly different from the press conference.
ThePrint’s one-year audit of 9 flagship cases tells the tale. The Malerkotla module - Yameen Mohammed, Gazala and Saleem Khan - charged with feeding information to the Pakistan High Commission staffer Ehsan-ur-Rahim alias Danish, is on bail and no chargesheet has yet been filed. The Gurdaspur module (Karanbir Singh and Sukhpreet Singh) was bailed by the Punjab and Haryana High Court in early May 2026 while the trial court awaits a supplementary chargesheet. Gagandeep Singh of Tarn Taran, alleged to have shared “troop deployments, strategic locations and army movements during Operation Sindoor” with twenty alleged ISI contacts, was released on bail by a district court in September 2025. YouTuber Jasbir Singh, accused of sharing intelligence and contacts with Jyoti Malhotra and Danish, was bailed by the same High Court in October 2025 with the observation that the videos relied upon “appeared to be of locations and subjects that are accessible to the general public”.
The pattern recurs further south. On April 8, 2026, Justice Vinod S Bhardwaj of the Punjab and Haryana High Court bailed Davender Singh, the Kaithal student whom the Haryana Police had paraded as a textbook case of cross-border espionage, holding that the State could not even clarify “whether the video pertained to the period between the incident at Pahalgam and/or the commencement of Operation Sindoor". Of the 9 flagship cases, only Naval clerk Vishal Yadav (Rajasthan) and two Haryana accused (Arman and Mohammed Tarif, charged under the Official Secrets Act) remain in custody. The high-profile exception is Jyoti Malhotra, whose bail was rejected by Justice Surya Pratap Singh in March 2026 invoking the statutory presumption under Section 4 of the Official Secrets Act, 1923. 10 months and 1 chargesheet later, the case has not even reached the stage of framing of charges.
In short: securitised arrests have made for confident headlines and tentative prosecutions. The data on the National Judicial Data Grid confirms the broader picture. The Supreme Court alone crossed 88,000 pending matters by August 2025; High Courts carry over 63 lakh pending cases and undertrials remain at roughly 76% of the prison population per the India Justice Report 2025. Every “spy” denied bail tomorrow joins this bottleneck.
Three patterns emerge.
First, courts have begun to invoke a citizen’s “duty” alongside the right to free speech - a constitutional move with no textual mooring outside the non-justiciable Article 51A. Justice Surya Kant’s “where is the duty?” has been echoed almost verbatim in subsequent bail rejections, including in Ashraf Khan.
Second, the timing of speech has become an evaluative criterion. The Supreme Court in Mahmudabad expressly noted that the question was not merely what was said but whether it was “the time” to say it. The implication - that the constitutional value of speech contracts during a national-security crisis - sits uneasily with the Court’s own pre-Sindoor ruling in Imran Pratapgarhi v. State of Gujarat (2025), which held only weeks earlier that Section 196 BNS “cannot be applied based on the views of people who take offense at every minor criticism,” and mandated preliminary inquiry under Section 173(3) BNSS before any speech-related FIR.
Third, procedural safeguards travel unevenly. The Andhra Pradesh High Court, by circular dated July 5, 2025, threatened contempt against magistrates who remand persons in speech cases without complying with Pratapgadhi and Arnesh Kumar. But many trial courts continue to remand reflexively, leaving the corrective work to the constitutional courts - themselves uneven.
The pattern is not a doctrinal revolution, but a vocabulary shift; one in which “the country has faced a big challenge” becomes a workable judicial premise even in the absence of an Article 352 Proclamation. India is not under a declared Emergency. Yet, as the espionage data shows, the police routinely act as if it were and the courts, in many cases, accept the framing without insisting on the proof. The Supreme Court that once held in Bharat Singh that a war abroad did not license unlawful executive action at home now finds itself echoing the police press conference more than the constitutional text.
Whether this is a transient war-time accommodation or a more durable recalibration will turn on whether the strong free-speech reasoning of Pratapgarhi and the principled scepticism of the Punjab and Haryana High Court reassert themselves once the gunsmoke clears. For now, Operation Sindoor has not merely changed India’s doctrine on terror; it has quietly entered the grammar of the courtroom.
Arjun Sheoran is an Advocate practicing in the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
The views expressed in this article are personal.