The Delhi High Court on Tuesday granted bail to Mohammad Danish, one of the accused in the killing of head constable Ratan Lal during the riots that broke out in the national Capital in February last year. Danish’s lawyer Anshu Kapoor said that he was the first person to get bail in the case, for which proceedings have not begun yet. The police have filed charges against 17 accused in the case.

While granting bail, Justice Suresh Kumar Kait asked Danish to furnish a personal bond of Rs 20,000 with one surety of the same amount. The judge observed that the petitioner was not needed for the investigation.

“In view of the facts discussed above and the facts that charge-sheet has already been filed, the petitioner is no more required for investigation and trial of the case shall take substantial time, I am of the view, the petitioner deserves bail,” he said.

In its order, Kait said that there was no CCTV footage or viral video that could implicate Danish in the case. “It is much later after a span of twelve days in their supplementary statement dated 10.03.2020, the name of petitioner [Danish] appears and the petitioner was initially arrested by Nandnagri police officials on 10.03.2020 from there he was taken to Crime Branch office, Chanakyapuri,” the order said. “Moreover, there are three public witnesses in this case and none of them have named the petitioner formally in their respective statements.”

The court also said that the call records show that Danish was not even in the violence-affected area on February 24, when the incident took place. “As per CDRs [call detail records], there is no outgoing or incoming call/SMS from the mobile number of the petitioner to any of the co-accused numbers,” the judge added.

Danish was named in a disclosure statement made on March 11, 2020, by co-accused Muhammad Yunus and Muhammad Ayyub. However, the order said there was no call detail records entry which can show any calls between the people disclosing his name and the petitioner.

The order also pointed to a statement of senior advocate Salman Khurshid, the petitioner’s counsel, that there was no recovery made from Danish to connect him to the charges mentioned in the first information report. “He is educated only till class X,” Khurshid had submitted. “He was made to sign some plain papers which later found out to be disclosure statements attributed to him.”

Disclosure statements

As reported by Scroll.in in July, the disclosure statements of the accused in the case, along with Danish, are identical, with a few lines missing in one. The statements use exactly the same words in exactly the same sequence.

“When we came on the road to block the Main Wazirabad Road then the police tried to explain things to us but according to our plan, we all started pelting stones on the police party and used the sticks, baseballs, iron rods hidden in the tent to beat police and others on the road,” the disclosure statements read.

A similar line about protestors allegedly hiding “sticks, baseball, iron road [rod], etc” appears in the first information report written by the police.

Even the confession in five of the six statements is identical: “Swept by emotion, under the influence of provocative messages on social media and to oppose the CAA and NRC which our friends said was against the Muslim community, I helped rioters on February 24, according to a plan, attacking policemen and members of the public, and vandalising public and private property,” it read.

The case

Following the death of the head constable, a first information report filed on February 25, where it was alleged that he was murdered by a rioting mob near Chandbagh. No accused was identified by name in the FIR.

Subsequently, the police arrested 17 Muslim men – all residents of Chandbagh and neighbouring localities. Seven of them were arrested on March 11: Mohammad Danish, Mohammad Saleem Khan, Saleem Malik alias Munna, Mohammad Jalaluddin alias Guddu Bhai, Arif, Mohammad Ayub and Mohammad Yunus.

Clashes had broken out between supporters of the Citizenship Amendment Act and those opposing it between February 23 and 26, 2020, in North East Delhi, killing 53 people and injuring hundreds. The police were accused of either inaction or complicity in some instances of violence, mostly in Muslim neighbourhoods. The violence was the worst Delhi saw since the anti-Sikh riots of 1984.

The Delhi Police claim that the violence was part of a larger conspiracy to defame Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government and was planned by those who organised the protests against the amended Citizenship Amendment Act. They also claimed the protestors had secessionist motives and were using “the facade of civil disobedience” to destabilise the government. The police have arrested several activists and students based on these “conspiracy” charges.