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New Delhi: E. Abubaker, founding chairman of the banned Popular Front of India (PFI), has spent three and a half years in Tihar Jail of India under Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). He is 74, has Parkinson’s and cancer, and cannot walk.\nAccording to Kashmir Media Service, before the arrest, there was a room built for a body. In Koduvally, a town in Kerala’s Kozhikode district, E. Abubaker’s family had constructed a study as an extension of their home, fitted with two special recliners, each calibrated to hold him at precisely 35 degrees. After surgery for esophagopharyngeal carcinoma in 2019, during which eighty per cent of his stomach was removed, this angle became the architecture of his survival. Anything flatter, and the partially digested food would return.
\nOn September 22, 2022, officers from the National Investigation Agency arrived at that home. Abubaker was running a fever. His wife helped him rise from bed, helped him walk, and helped him dress. His hands shook from Parkinson’s disease, he could not draw his own insulin, could not button his own shirt. His son, Amal Thahseen, showed the officers his father’s medical records, explained the medications, their dosages, their precise timing. “Even missing a single tablet like Syndopa will make him very weak,” Amal would later recall. The officers told the family to hand over the documents and medicines. “They said that they will take care.”
\nAbubaker, a retired schoolteacher, founding chairman of the now-banned Popular Front of India, a man who had spent three decades in political life without a single criminal case, was taken to Delhi. He has not returned.
\nRights groups warn that his continued incarceration in this critical condition risks the same fate as Father Stan Swamy and Pandu Narote \u2014 death in custody, while unconvicted and still waiting for trial. “Another political prisoner,” they say, “may be murdered through custodial neglect.”
\nHis body, meanwhile, does not defer. The list of conditions reads like a medical textbook: Diabetes Mellitus with Retinopathy. Hypertension. Idiopathic Parkinson’s Disease. Coronary Artery Disease. Postoperative esophagopharyngeal carcinoma. Benign Prostatic Hyperplasia. A medical report from AIIMS, based on a January 2025 outpatient consultation, documents the same comorbidities and notes a prior admission under the Department of Geriatric Medicine in November 2024. A separate assessment dated May 2026 by a Senior Consultant Neurologist at Indraprastha Apollo Hospitals, states that Abubaker “is in a relatively later stage of the disease” and “needs support to stand and walk due to tendency for falls,” as well as “help with activities of daily living like toilet needs, bathing, dressing and taking his medicines.”
\nBefore arrest, these conditions were managed by his family through a precise regime of medications, diet, and constant physical assistance. In custody, they have become a series of bureaucratic negotiations.
\nEarlier this year, when Abubaker was admitted to Deen Dayal Upadhyay Hospital in Delhi with a chest infection, dangerously fluctuating blood pressure, and plummeting blood sugar, the admission itself took three days. The Delhi police officers responsible for escorting him kept returning him to jail, telling authorities “he is ok.” Each time, the jail medical officer sent him back. “This happened many times and lasted for three days,” Amal says.
\nHe was discharged from DDU after four days without improvement. The hospital said they planned to shift him to a facility with better treatment. Instead, he was shifted back to jail. That same day, the family had obtained a court order instructing the hospital to follow his prescribed diet plan, an order that arrived at an empty bed.
\nThe family fought through the courts to secure a dietary plan, a 3+3 DASH diet prescribed by AIIMS doctors. The jail authorities follow it, Amal says, “with their limited facilities.” Non-vegetarian food is not available. But during hospital visits and admissions, the diet is not followed at all. “He remained in hospital without food for long hours,” Amal recounts. Each hospital visit, meant to treat him, leaves him weaker than before.
\nWhen the trial court first denied bail in June 2023, it directed that Abubacker be admitted to AIIMS for comprehensive care. His lawyers say this was never implemented. A medical board of ten AIIMS doctors was eventually constituted following Supreme Court directions, but the family disputes the resulting report. For three and a half years, they say, AIIMS has consistently declared him “medically fit and not in a critical condition.” In court filings, Abubacker described his experience at AIIMS as “disastrous.” He wrote to the jail superintendent asking not to be sent there again, and filed a petition seeking treatment at a private hospital instead.
\nThe family sought permission to have him treated at a private hospital at their own expense. In March 2026, the Delhi High Court refused the transfer but permitted a physical examination at Apollo Hospital for a second opinion, directing that his primary treatment continue at AIIMS. The jail authorities, in a report submitted to the court, acknowledged the limits of what they could provide. The NIA said it was not opposing treatment, only insisting it occur at government-controlled hospitals. “The doctors are treating him as a convicted criminal instead of treating him as a patient,” his lawyers told Maktoob.
\nHe is now 74. He has been in Tihar Jail for more than three and a half years. His trial has not begun. He has not been convicted of anything.
\nUnder sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, India’s primary anti-terror legislation, and the Indian Penal Code, he stands accused of conspiracy and involvement in raising funds and radicalising Muslim youth to join proscribed organisations. The case, FIR No. RC-14\/2022\/NIA\/DLI, was registered on April 13, 2022. He was arrested five months later, on the same day that over a hundred PFI activists were swept up across ten states by the NIA. Six days after his arrest, the government banned PFI and eight of its affiliated organisations for five years.
\nCritics called the ban arbitrary and politically motivated. The Social Democratic Party of India, PFI’s political arm, called it “a direct blow to democracy,” saying the government was “misusing investigation agencies and laws to silence the opposition.” The CPI(ML)’s general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya said the crackdown was “a conscious attempt by the Modi government to spread Islamophobia.” Former Delhi Minority Commission chairman Zafarul-Islam Khan said there was “no evidence in the public domain” of PFI’s involvement in illegal activities.
\nAccording to the Delhi High Court’s order denying bail, the NIA’s investigation alleges that PFI, acting through its National Executive Council members, including Abubaker, “had conspired and covertly aimed to establish Islamic\/Shariah Law in India by or before the year 2047 by overthrowing the democratic and constitutional system of government.” The court noted allegations that Abubaker was an authorised signatory on PFI bank accounts from which funds were allegedly transferred to a person accused of terrorism, and that he supervised the recruitment and radicalisation of Muslim youths and the organisation of camps the NIA describes as weapon-training programmes. The court deemed the prosecution’s case under UAPA prima facie true.
\nAbubaker’s lawyers contest these claims. They argue the NIA has failed to establish reasonable grounds that the accusations are true, that the case is “preparatory” with no specific place, date, or overt act of offence, and that the accused were identified before the investigation rather than as a result of it. The FIR was registered on April 13, 2022, but no action was taken for five months until the mass arrests of September 22, a gap, the defence says, that the NIA has never explained.
\nThe Supreme Court, after reviewing a medical report, said it was “not inclined to grant bail on the aforesaid ground at this stage”, but gave him liberty to approach the trial court again if his condition worsened. This week, a Supreme Court bench granted bail to another UAPA detainee held for over six years without trial, warning that prolonged detention under the law risks becoming punishment in itself. “Bail is the rule and jail is the exception,” it said, “even under UAPA.”
\nTwice a week, Abubaker’s family is permitted a physical visit or one video conference call. Once a week, on Sundays, a five-minute phone call. Through the glass partition of the visiting room, they watch a man receding.
\n“During family visits, he always tries to make us happy by covering his health issues,” Amal says. “He acquires energy to talk by adding jokes and smiling.” But the performance has become harder to sustain. After the chest infection and hospitalisation, Abubacker can no longer walk a single step. He arrives in a wheelchair. The visiting room requires him to stand to use the telephone receiver through the glass. He cannot stand long. His voice has dropped so low that the family strains to understand what he is saying.
\nParkinson’s disease is taking his memory. He cannot remember the names of his grandchildren. He forgot the name of his co-inmate, OMA Salam, the former PFI chairman, held in the same facility. Mid-sentence, he gets stuck, forgets what he was about to say.
\nAbubaker is not alone in this condition. Among the co-accused, E.M. Abdurahman is 72, and Prof. P. Koya is 76, all facing age-related health problems in custody. Another accused, Ismail from Tamil Nadu, suffered a haemorrhagic stroke in jail and was discharged from hospital after three days with the assessment of “minor ailment.” According to Nasar, one accused has died in custody in Kerala from a terminal illness. None of them have been convicted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"