Delhi riots case: A farcical, political charge sheet

The investigation and follow-up actions by Delhi Police on the communal riots in north-east Delhi in February this year have become so farcical and absurd that they could be laughed away if they did not have consequences. But because they are part of the legal process and procedures being gone through by a law-enforcement agency, they need to be taken seriously.

They impact the lives of many people whose names figure in the charge sheet, they take up the time of the court and, most importantly, their outcome is important for the people who were affected by the riots and are waiting for justice. But the investigations and the charge sheet based on them, filed till now, seem to be grossly unfair and seem more intended to harass some people and to deny justice than to uphold the law, with the whole effort amounting to a waste of time of the court.

The police on Wednesday filed a charge sheet consisting of 17,500 pages against 15 people for propagating violence during the riots under various sections of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, Arms Act and the Indian Penal Code (IPC). The operative portion comprises 2,692 pages. Among those named in it are a suspended AAP Councillor Tahir Hussain and a number of student activists who had protested against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). On Sunday, the police had arrested Umar Khalid, a JNU student leader, for “inciting riots’’.

The names of prominent political leaders and others who had opposed the CAA figured earlier in a secondary charge sheet. The investigations seem to be more about creating a linkage between the anti-CAA protests and the riots and booking those who took part in the protests, rather than finding out who actually conspired to unleash the riots and who perpetrated them.

The police have told the court that the anti-CAA protests were not democratic protests from the beginning and were meant to instigate violence. It said that the “conspirators were in direct touch with the foot soldiers that resulted in the riots’’ (sic). It has also said that anybody who has questions about its investigations can go to court with the complaint. Those who are known to have conspired to create trouble and instigated people, like the BJP leaders who made incendiary speeches and made social media postings, and many others who participated in the riots have been spared by the police and are not charge-sheeted.

Instead it is the victims and those who had nothing to do with the riots but have opposed the government and its policies who are at the punishing end of the law. This can only discredit the system of justice and the rule of law.