Delhi Riots: How The Police Is Using FIR 59 To Imprison Students And Activists Indefinitely // Four FIRs, 20 Crimes: The Price Of Protesting The CAA For Sadaf Jafar

By Dilip - Thursday, June 18, 2020

On March 6, ten days after Delhi’s worst communal riots in a generation, Arvind Kumar a sub-Inspector of the Narcotics Cell of the Delhi Police’s Crime Branch filed a complaint that would come to be known as FIR 59/2020. Kumar claimed to have information that the riots were a conspiracy by former JNU student Umar Khalid and his associates who had given provocative speeches and collected arms and ammunition, while staging protests..

India: End Bias in Prosecuting Delhi Violence

In the three months since it was first filed, FIR 59 has morphed from naming two people for four serious but bailable offenses of rioting, being armed with a deadly weapon, unlawful assembly, read with criminal conspiracy, into what appears to a roving witch-hunt against students and activists who protested against the Narendra Modi government’s controversial citizenship law in the months preceding the Delhi riots.

As things stand, FIR 59 now accuses at least 14 people, including Safoora Zargar, an MPhil student, Meeran Haider, a PhD candidate, and Gulfisha Fatima, an MBA graduate, and three other students, of some of the gravest offenses in the land including murder, sedition and terrorism. Their lives are caught amidst a series of FIRs, bail hearings, court orders, and incarceration in the middle of the coronavirus pandemic.

FIR 59 is one of 750 filed in connection with the Delhi riots, but lawyers say it is one of the most visible examples of how the Delhi Police, which reports to Home Minister Amit Shah, is using the riots as a pretext to place some of the Modi regime’s most charismatic and outspoken critics under indefinite incarceration....
https://www.huffingtonpost.in/entry/delhi-police-riots-students-anti-caa-activists-arrest_in_5ee7ab99c5b651a404b0591a

Four FIRs, 20 Crimes: The Price Of Protesting The CAA For Sadaf Jafar

Sadaf Jafar, a member of the Congress Party, says that she knew that her name was in two First Information Reports in connection with the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Uttar Pradesh, but the political activist recently found out that the UP Police had booked her in two more FIRs. Jafar says she is now booked in four FIRs containing 34 criminal provisions, with some of them common to all the FIRs. HuffPost India counted 20 separate crimes in the four FIRs.

Jafar, who was the only woman arrested in Lucknow following an anti-CAA protest on 19 December, has alleged that she was tortured while in police custody in Hazratganj Police Station. The protest, held amidst Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s crackdown on dissent in the Bharatiya Janata Party-ruled state, descended into chaos and violence that gripped UP in the days that followed. Over a thousand people were arrested including almost all the prominent social and political activists in Lucknow, even the elderly among them.

It took nearly a month for the anti-CAA protest to resume, this time in the form of a sit-in staged mostly by Muslim women near the iconic Ghanta Ghar, inspired by the sit-in staged by women in Shaheen Bagh in New Delhi. Jafar, a 43-year-old mother of two children and a former school teacher, told HuffPost India that she knew about two FIRs - the first registered at the Hazratganj Police Station on 19 December in connection with the anti-CAA protest that same day, and the second registered at Thakurganj Police Station on 10 February in connection with the Ghanta Ghar protest. Jafar says she found out about the other two FIRs on Tuesday when she was summoned to the Thakurganj Police Station to complete certain formalities with respect to FIRs....