Two months after a Delhi court ordered an FIR in connection with a mob being mobilised using loudspeakers to target Muslims during the Northeast Delhi riots, police have informed that no progress has been made in the investigation.
Additional Sessions Judge Vinod Yadav responded that this was a “sorry state of affairs”.
The court said that the Delhi Police Commissioner had constituted a special team recently to monitor ongoing investigations in “riots cases”.
“It appears that the present case has so far not got the attention of either Worthy Commissioner of Police, Delhi Police or the SIC constituted by him,” the court said.
“It is being claimed by the police in other cases of riots that the circumstances prevailing during the period of riots and almost four weeks thereafter were really difficult and the police could not investigate the cases properly. Thereafter, Delhi was engulfed in the coronavirus pandemic and, as such, the quality investigation in the matter could not take place. I wonder whether the police can take the same excuse qua the investigation of (present) case FIR. The answer has to be ‘clear no’,” the order read.
In this hearing, a new special public prosecutor, Sanjeev Sahay, appeared, replacing the previous SPP, D K Bhatia. Sahay “candidly” submitted that “although he has gone through the chargesheet, however, he is required to obtain instructions in the matter to have a feel of this litigation as well as about the riots cases of Northeast Delhi generally”.
The court granted the SPP time till the next hearing to take instructions and apprise it on the investigation carried out in the case so far.
As per court records, one Nisar Ahmad filed a complaint with SHO Gokulpuri that on 25 February 2020, a mob vandalised and looted his house. Ahmad claimed that the police took down a very short complaint regarding theft.
On March 18, at the Eidgah relief camp in Mustafabad, he gave a detailed complaint stating how a mob of 200-250 people was mobilised with a large public address system, where “a clarion call was being given to the persons of a particular community to go and vandalise and put on fire the houses of persons of other community”.
Ahmad’s complaint was clubbed with another complaint in which no accused was named.
Following arguments by Ahmad’s lawyer, M R Shamshad, a Metropolitan Magistrate on November 19, 2020 ordered police to register a separate FIR in this case, which was challenged by the police.
This story first appeared on indianexpress.com