Lawyers group tracks detainees, ensures paperwork, issue SOPs amid Delhi protest crackdown

A distress call came around 11pm on Sunday. Thirty to 40 people were being held at Najafgarh in southwest Delhi, five or six of them minors, and some claiming to be injured. Within minutes, a message went out to lawyer groups. By the time Shobhit Chaudhary had spoken to the police point of contact, independent lawyers near Najafgarh had been located and dispatched.

“We basically worked on creating a rapid response system for the fraternity,” said Chaudhary, a Delhi-based independent litigator. “It is working, but in all honesty there should not be a need for this to be working.” Track all updates from protests against Gyanesh Kumar here

He is part of a legal volunteer network that has worked around the clock over the last few days to help protesters amid mass detentions in the Capital over protests against chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

On Sunday, the Supreme Court held a special sitting and ordered that peaceful, unarmed protesters not be detained except through the procedure established by law, and that normal metro and rail services and internet connectivity be restored. The detentions continued regardless.

Around 100 people, including All India Students’ Association president Neha Bora and Communist Party of India (Marxist) lawmaker John Brittas, were picked up near Connaught Place on Sunday evening.

As the Delhi Police detained thousands on Saturday, many were stopped at checkpoints while trying to enter central Delhi. The detainees included leaders of student organisations and political parties.

Each lawyer brings their own network of friends, batch mates and colleagues, which allows a distress call to be pushed quickly to whoever is nearest the site. “It is more like a message delivery mechanism, where we can find out which lawyers are near the area,” Chaudhary said.

Detainees are also asked to drop a live location in the protest WhatsApp groups they are usually part of, with their name and the number of people in the vehicle.

He highlighted recurring complaints. The first is that people were detained before reaching the protest site, or outside the area where the prohibitory order under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita was in force. “That kind of preventive detention is really out of order. It is definitely not lawful.”

He said detainees went without food for long stretches. Chaudhary added that one group of 20-22 young men who had travelled to Delhi for the protest were picked up near Anand Vihar and held in a building. They were given bananas, and nothing else until about 2.30pm, and their phones were taken from them. Chaudhary said their team also found several minors at a detention centre in outer Delhi and that some released detainees were injured.

Chaudhary said senior lawyers are now involved, and the matter is likely to go to the court, seeking answers from Delhi Police and the Union home ministry. “This cannot be forgotten,” he said. “If this is a problem today, it will be a problem tomorrow or the day after.”

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