'A 22-year-old woman who filed a police complaint alleging gangrape in Bihar’s Araria district has been arrested on charges of disrupting court proceedings on July 10. She had demanded the presence of social workers during the recording of her statement before the district judge, said members of the Jan Jagran Shakti Sangathan, a non-profit organisation that helped her through the process of filing a first information report with the Araria police. Two social workers who had accompanied her to the court – Kalyani Badola and Tanmay Nivedita – have also been arrested.
'Social media can be used by a person just like a gun in his hand, observed the Supreme Court on Friday as it found favour with an order asking a Congress leader from Uttar Pradesh to stay away from social media for at least 18 months. The top court has decided to formulate guidelines on use of social media in criminal cases, especially in matters of bail. "What is wrong with an order asking you not to use social media? If a court can order an accused to stay away from a gun, it can similarly ask you to stay away from social media," said Chief Justice of India SA Bobde...'
'On the same day that eight policemen were gunned down in Uttar Pradesh, two equally horrific incidents went unnoticed. First, four members of a family were murdered in Allahabad. Then, a 19-year-old Dalit girl and her father were murdered by her stalker, who belongs to the Thakur caste, days before her wedding. These are not isolated incidents, but part of a larger crime arc that would have been labelled ‘gunda raj’ if they had occurred under the governance of a lower-caste Chief Minister.
'The Delhi Police’s First Information Report into one the most controversial deaths in the 2020 Delhi Riots omits any reference to the police’s alleged role in the incident. 23-year-old Faizan died in February this year, days after he was violently assaulted by uniformed policemen and forced to sing the national anthem. A video of the incident sparked outrage after it went viral online and was also carried by several news outlets.
'The Uttar Pradesh police has booked the executive editor and editor-in-chief of the news portal Scroll.in under various charges of the Scheduled Caste and Scheduled Tribe (Prevention of Atrocities) Act, 1989 and sections of the Indian Penal Code... Sharma recently wrote a series of reports on the poor state of affairs in Varanasi, which is also Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s parliamentary constituency.
'Sadaf Jafar, a member of the Congress Party, says that she knew that her name was in two First Information Reports in connection with the protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Uttar Pradesh, but the political activist recently found out that the UP Police had booked her in two more FIRs. Jafar says she is now booked in four FIRs containing 34 criminal provisions, with some of them common to all the FIRs. HuffPost India counted 20 separate crimes in the four FIRs...'
'Ashwini Saini is a contributor to a Facebook page that publishes news on the Mandi district of Himachal Pradesh. Saini, who also works as a freelancer for the Hindi daily Dainik Jagran, filed a video report for the page, called ‘Mandi Live’, on April 8. The report highlighted the failure of the district administration in supplying rations to migrant workers stranded in the district’s Sundernagar sub-division.
'Nine human rights defenders, most of whom have been fighting for the release of the Bhima Koregaon 11 through litigation, research, or activism, were unlawfully targeted with a spyware attack... Amnesty International and the Citizen Lab have uncovered a coordinated spyware campaign targeting at least nine human rights defenders (HRDs) in India. Eight of the nine HRDs have been calling for the release of other prominent activists, popularly known as the Bhima Koregaon 11, most of whom have been imprisoned in Maharashtra, India since 2018.
'A city civil and sessions court has rejected the bail application filed by Amulya Leona in relation to a sedition case registered by the city police for raising pro-Pakistan slogans during the anti-CAA rally held here in February... The grounds taken by counsel of Amulya for seeking bail, the judge said, “The points which have been raised by the petitioner are to be considered at the time of the full-fledged trial. If the petitioner is granted bail, she may abscond. Therefore, the bail petition of the petitioner is liable to be rejected."...'
'A key element of the Delhi Police’s investigation into the communal violence in Northeast Delhi is its claim that the riots were part of a “well-hatched” conspiracy. And at the core of its conspiracy theory, lies an alleged meeting that took place on 8 January at Shaheen Bagh. The Quint has accessed two charge sheets submitted by the Delhi Police, both related to the violence in the Chand Bagh area.
