On Monday, the Delhi High Court passed an emphatic order that requires the police to conserve the case diary that is related to the February 2020 Jafrabad violence, where one person was killed. The judgment, which was delivered by Justice Ravinder Dudeja, who was presiding on a bench, was made after hearing a petition submitted by activist Devangana Kalita. The decision of the court partly satisfied the plea of Kalita: it granted the previous interim order (of December 2) on full and absolute effect, which meant that the police could not tamper with the diary. It, however, opposed the request of Kalita to reconstruct the diary, saying that the Court was not yet prepared to investigate the truth of the allegations raised.
The petition filed by Kalita opposed a November 6 decision of the court that had refused to listen to her. Along with fellow student activist Natasha Narwal, she had claimed that the statements of witnesses had been tampered with, and even before, recorded in the case diary, by the Delhi Police. The Judicial Magistrate First Class, Udbhav Kumar Jain, had previously observed that their submissions were sound, but that the court could not yet determine whether those claims were true or not. As a result, on December 2, the High Court came up with an interim order which instructed the police to protect the diary.
The genesis of the incident is that a case had been registered on February 26, 2020, accusing Kalita, Narwal, and others, including Umar Khalid and Gulfisha Fatima, of plotting to cause unrest in Jafrabad, in the name of peaceful protests. In September 2020, the court granted Kalita bail, which the Supreme Court upheld on June 18, 2021.
The recent order highlights the insistence of the judiciary to uphold the integrity of evidence, as well as outlining the jurisdiction boundaries of the immediate investigative power. The contextual copy of the judgment passed by Justice Dudeja is expected with great eagerness, since it will probably provide a precedent about the treatment of the police archives in situations related to major civil strife.
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