The Caravan

CRIME and PREJUDICE

{ONE}

SHADAB ALAM BEGAN his day as usual on 24 February 2020. He woke up at his house in Old Mustafabad, in northeast Delhi, where he had been living for more than half a decade, and left by 10 am for Samrat Medical Store, on Wazirabad Road, near Brijpuri Chowk. He had worked at the pharmacy for many years, and it was his job to open it every morning.

The previous afternoon, the Bharatiya Janata Party leader Kapil Mishra had delivered an incendiary speech near the Jaffrabad metro station, a few kilometres away. Hundreds of women were staging a sit-in at the station to protest the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, passed last year by the Narendra Modi government, and the proposed National Register of Citizens. A wave of demonstrations against the CAA and NRC had swept Delhi and the country, led largely by Muslims who understood their place in the Indian republic to be threatened by the initiatives. The BJP and other Hindutva groups had vilified the protesters, and in numerous places the demonstrations were met with intimidation and violence. Mishra, with the deputy commissioner of police for northeast Delhi standing beside him, declared that if the Delhi Police did not clear the protests at Jaffrabad and neighbouring Chand Bagh, “we will have to come out on the street.”

“When we told the police officials that we needed to urinate, they would tell us to do it inside the cell itself,” Shadab Alam said. “We saw others being thrashed while being taken to the bathroom, so after that none of us would ask.”

Alam knew there had been attacks against Muslims in the area the previous night following Mishra’s speech, but he did not think things would escalate further. He worked for a few hours at the shop, then left for the afternoon prayer at a mosque in the Kasab Pura area. Before he headed back, a friend told him over the phone that Muslims were being attacked again. Alam took a longer route to the pharmacy than usual, and returned at around 3 pm.

There was soon loud shouting in the area, and passersby warned of approaching trouble. Anurag Ghai, who owns the pharmacy, shut the shop and climbed to the terrace above it with four of his employees. Besides Alam, two of the others, Naved and Aqib, were Muslims.

A short while later, a group of policemen appeared at a gate that connected to a neighbouring terrace, and tried to climb over it to where Ghai and his employees were. As soon as he allowed them to enter, Ghai later recorded in a sworn affidavit, the police began rounding up the Muslim men. While Ghai pleaded that his employees had been at work, and had not been involved in any violence, he noticed that Alam and Naved were no longer on the terrace. He rushed downstairs in time to see the police taking the men away in a van.

Ghai was told to come to the police station in nearby Dayalpur to seek their release. He went that day, and on each of the next three days, to no effect. In his affidavit, submitted with Alam’s bail plea, Ghai wrote, “The police officials neither informed about the reason for Shadab’s detention nor provided any information about when he would be released.” Alam’s brother also went to the station numerous times, but he could do no better.

Alam remained in custody at the Dayalpur police station for four nights, with 23 other Muslim men picked up from various parts of northeast Delhi. “The first night, some policemen came; they asked our names and kept beating us as they did,” Alam said. “They were drunk. They beat us a lot.”

The men were not allowed to use the bathroom. “When we told the police officials that we needed to urinate, they would tell us to do it inside the cell itself,” Alam said. “We saw others being thrashed while being taken to the bathroom, so after that none of us would ask.”

The abuse had a clear communal colour. Alam said the men were forced to chant “Jai Shri Ram”— Hail Lord Ram. At night, he recalled, drunk policemen beating the men boasted about the number of Muslims they had shot that day.

Mohammed Razi, a resident of Dayalpur, was also among the detainees. He was picked up at around 2.30 pm on 24 February, he later told us, on his way home from work. “A policeman asked my name and then hit me with his baton, instructing me to sit in the police vehicle,” Razi said. “The police picked up more Muslim boys on way to the police station, where we reached at around 4.30 pm.”

Razi, too, described custodial torture that lasted four consecutive nights. “They hit us so badly they broke two of their batons on the very first night,” Razi said. “They beat us with belts, and I was asked to urinate on a room heater.” The heater had an exposed electric coil, and Razi feared that urinating on it would mean electrocuting his genitals. “I kept standing silently, prepared in my mind for more thrashing,” he said. Ultimately, the police did not force him to do it.

Indian criminal procedure unequivocally prohibits the police from detaining anyone for more than 24 hours without producing them before a magistrate. A team of lawyers contacted by the men’s families approached the courts, and on 28 February, a magistrate directed the Dayalpur police station to account for them. The police finally produced the detained men in court later that day.

The magistrate also directed that the lawyers be allowed to meet the men at the station. Five of the 24 detainees had already been taken to court when the lawyers arrived, but the others, including Alam and Razi, were still in lock-up. “We were shocked to see their condition,” one of the lawyers said. “They were stinking, many sat motionless on the floor in the lockup.”

According to the lawyers, the Delhi Police booked the first five detainees taken to the court under the Arms Act, which regulates weaponry. The court sent them to judicial custody. The lawyers were not at the court when the five were presented, but they were in attendance when the remaining 19 men were produced. The lawyers accused the police of custodial torture, which the police denied. The police also denied that the men had been held in illegal custody, past the 24-hour limit, and claimed that all 19 had been arrested earlier that same day, under two first-information reports registered at the Dayalpur police station on 24 February.

Ten of the men were arrested in connection to the first of these, FIR Number 57 of 2020, which concerned a chicken shop and numerous vehicles that had been burnt down near Sherpur Chowk, in Khajuri Khas, during the communal violence on the night of 23 February. It did not name a single specific perpetrator. The second, FIR Number 58 of 2020, referred only to the violence in general, and also did not accuse anyone by name. The nine remaining men were arrested in connection to this document. According to the lawyer, the police “were not clear on the names that had to be divided into the two FIRs” even when the detainees arrived in court.

Despite claiming that the men had been arrested just that day, the police did not want to question them further: the police asked the court to send the men to judicial custody, not to police custody, where they could be interrogated.

The magistrate Richa Manchanda was not persuaded that the men should be released. Manchanda passed almost identical orders in the two cases arising from the two FIRs, and sent the men to judicial custody till 13 March.

When accusing the police of custodial torture, the lawyers had asked for an immediate medical examination of the detained men. The police objected, claiming that they had already been examined. Manchanda agreed to the lawyers’ request, and the men were examined upon arrival at Delhi’s Mandoli Central Jail. Alam’s examination revealed “large bruises on back and buttocks,” and “injury marks on Lt thigh, on Rt thigh upper and buttock.”

Even when they were produced in court, the men did not know what crimes they had been accused of. “We did not get anything that was being discussed,” Razi said. It was only after arriving at the jail that Razi learnt he had been booked under FIR 58. Alam was booked under FIR 57.

Alam’s lawyers filed his first bail application on 11 March. It included his account of custodial torture and medical proof of his injuries, as well as the sworn affidavit from Ghai, backed by CCTV footage from the pharmacy and terrace to corroborate his account of Alam’s detention four days before the police claimed he was arrested. “It is a matter of record that the FIR does not contain the name or any details of any of the alleged accused giving the police a free hand to pick and choose as to whom they want to arrest,” the application noted.

Hukum Singh, the investigating officer in the case, filed a reply on behalf of the Delhi Police. He claimed that an unnamed “special informer” had told him about a gathering of rioters at Sherpur Chowk at 3 am on 28 February, and that the police arrived on the scene to arrest the accused. Singh wrote that the accused had caused “nuisance in general public,” “tried to disturb the peace,” “raised slogans against the country” and “caused fire and damaged the property.” He argued that “riots can increase” if the accused were released. The magistrate Vinod Kumar Gautam issued ten identical orders to deny bail to all those arrested under FIR 57.

“We were given food for the first time on the twenty-seventh—puri and sabzi,” a 17-year-old detainee at the Dayalpur police station said. “They would only give us water.”

Alam’s lawyers filed another bail application before a sessions judge. To add to the earlier submissions and supporting materials, they argued that even Singh’s reply did not “disclose any basis for the identification of the accused or any description of his role / acts allegedly committed by him.” The judge Sudhir Kumar Jain dismissed the application, without saying anything of the police’s failure to produce even a single piece of evidence against Alam. Jain wrote in his dismissal order that Alam was “apprehended at the spot and was found involved in large scale violence and arson.”

The lawyers then moved the Delhi High Court seeking bail. The judge Mukta Gupta issued a detailed order identifying discrepancies in the police’s narrative. The police claimed to have found two eyewitnesses, yet had provided a statement from only one. Even that statement, Gupta noted, “is an omnibus statement and does not identify any accused.” The judge found it strange that “no police custody remand was sought,” and recorded the defence’s submission

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