- Saturday, March 01, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Jagtar Singh Johal, a Scottish Sikh individual imprisoned in India, has written to new British prime minister Liz Truss urging her to show “more guts” than his predecessors on his detention.
Johal, accused of conspiracy to murder and being part of a terror group, has been detained for almost five years now without trial.
His note, a handwritten one, was released by human rights body Reprieve, BBC reported, adding that it could not verify it independently.
The British government had said earlier that it has raised this matter with its Indian counterpart consistently.
Johal congratulated Truss on becoming the prime minister in the note and hoped that his “freedom will not be traded in return” for growing business links between the UK and India. He also mentioned the case of another British man held in the same Tihar prison in Delhi.
“I hope you show more guts than your predecessors when it comes to addressing the issue of UK citizens languishing in Indian prisons for years without trial,” Johal wrote.
He called his case “highly political motivated” and urged Truss, who took charge on Tuesday (6) to succeed Boris Johnson, to “make a stand and act” to ensure his release.
“Otherwise,” the note said, “as is evident with cases of Sikh political prisoners and minorities in India, decades can pass waiting for justice.”
He also mentioned Truss’s successful efforts in freeing Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe and another British hostage from Iranian prison.
Johal, who is from Dumbarton, was arrested in the northern Indian state of Punjab in November 2017, two weeks after his marriage.
He is accused by the Indian authorities of being part of a terror plot which carried out the killings of some prominent right-wing religious figures.
Mr Johal was arrested in India’s northern Punjab region in November 2017 two weeks after his wedding.
He is accused by the Indian government of being part of a terrorist plot which carried out the murders of prominent right-wing religious figures in Spring 2017.
His family alleged that Johal has been targeted because of his activism in documenting the persecution of Sikhs in Punjab in the early 1980s.
Johal has written another note before in which he alleged that he was tortured in the early days of his detention and forced to sign a blank confession statement. The Indian authorities, however, denied the claims.
The United Nations’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention said earlier this year that Johal should be given an immediate release. The body called his detention arbitrary and unlawful under international law.
In August, BBC reported that Johal was suing the UK government after Reprieve alleged that British intelligence services gave information to their Indian counterparts and it led to his detention and torture.
Truss had met Johal’s brother Gurpreet Singh Johal and member of parliament Martin Docherty-Hughes earlier this year when she was the foreign secretary.
