The Supreme Court has rejected a special leave petition by independent journalist Rupesh Kumar Singh challenging a Jharkhand High Court order that denied him bail in an Unlawful Activities Prevention Act case, Live Law reported on Thursday.

A bench of Justices MM Sundresh and Rajesh Bindal on January 27 said it was not inclined to interfere with the order issued by the High Court on December 6, 2023.

The Jharkhand-based journalist was arrested on July 17, 2022, on the allegation that he had arranged funds for Maoists. The arrest came after Singh posted a thread on the social media platform X, talking about the impact of industrial and air pollution on the residents of Jharkhand villages. He has been in custody since.

In his special leave petition, Singh called his arrest a “malicious campaign of persecution”, Live Law reported. The journalist said he had reported on several subjects, including gunfights with security forces and the arrests of Adivasis based on false claims of them being Maoists.

Singh was also among 40 Indian journalists whose phone numbers appeared in a leaked database in 2021, which reflected that they were potential targets of cyber surveillance through the use of Pegasus spyware that the Israeli NSO Group claims to sell only to governments.

In his petition, the journalist said he was targeted using Pegasus, Live Law reported.

This case is based on a first information report registered against a few alleged members of the banned Communist Party of India (Maoist). Singh was not named in the original FIR, Live Law reported.

However, information obtained by the police from Prashant Bose, who was listed as the primary accused in the case, and others during interrogation, allegedly incriminated Singh, Live Law quoted the special leave petition as saying.

Citing this material, the police claimed that Singh was also an active member of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) and knew the whereabouts of Bose and the others listed in the FIR. Subsequently, the police filed a supplementary chargesheet based on this purported evidence on May 7, 2022.

In its 2023 order denying him bail, the High Court said that “from perusal of various paragraphs of the chargesheet it appears that the appellant is active member of the banned naxal outfit and he has been propagating the idea of terrorism for many years by giving speeches, abetting the underground PLGA [People's Liberation Guerrilla Army] group to influence and add other people into the armed cadre group to strengthen their parties to fight the state agencies”.

The People’s Liberation Guerrilla Army is the armed wing of the Communist Party of India (Maoist).

‘Singh was merely a journalist’

In response to the dismissal of his special leave petition, Singh’s wife Shatakshi Ipsa said that his family had placed a lot of hope on the Supreme Court, Maktoob Media reported on Thursday. “It has been really stressful, and I do not know where to go from here,” she said.

“He is merely a small-time journalist who was covering stories,” Ipsa said. “But the authorities have spun conspiracy theories against him, making him look like some kind of criminal.”

She asked how one was to fight the state machinery and prove that Singh was just a journalist working for the community. “Has that become a crime now?” Ipsa added.