On 29 December 2022, through the state highway of Kerala, an NIA vehicle was passing at around 4 am, accompanied by a local police vehicle. A Few metres after the vehicle took a right turn to the gutter road through the rural landscape and stopped in front of a two-storeyed concrete house in a village, where everyone was asleep except the white-coloured herons who sought refuge at branches of the nearby tree.
The officers, who stepped out of the vehicle, walked to the main door of the house and knocked on the door as the doorbell was not functioning. Anvar*, a former Popular Front of India activist, and his wife were sleeping peacefully inside the house. As they got no reply, the local police officers walked near the bedroom window and started knocking.
The middle-aged lady, who was jolted awake by the sound of knocking initially thought that somebody reached their home during the odd hours to announce death news. She woke up her husband from sleep.
The local sub-inspector introduced himself and asked him to open the door.
“Following the ban of the organisation, I always have this intuition that a raid might soon happen at our house too. Never in my dreams, I thought that today would be the day,” Anvar’s wife said.
Anvar rushed to the door without wearing his shirt. As he was so concerned about not addressing strangers without covering his bare chest, he became so uncomfortable.
According to advocate Tushar Nirmal Sarathi, a lawyer who appeared for many defendants in cases registered in NIA courts, the house raids during the odd hours of the night is the general pattern seen in many cases investigated by the National Investigation Agency.
This story was originally published in maktoobmedia.com. Read the full story here