New Delhi: Gautam Buddha Nagar district magistrate (DM) Medha Roopam has been the recipient of ire and tough strictures from the Allahabad high court. Roopam, a signatory authority in connection with National Security Act (NSA) related charges against a student activist has been reprimanded by the court, which has also come down heavily on the prosecution representing the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government in Uttar Pradesh. The charge is that officers have relied on documents riddled with multiple loopholes to order the detention of the student activist, which has now been declared illegal by the court.

While remarking on the right to protest, the high court judgment has almost warned the state – which happens to be the Uttar Pradesh government in this case – why it’s important to give space to a citizen-led protest, not criminalise it.

The order is beyond routine, as it has ordered officers to pay costs for actions like illegally sending activists protesting to jail under the NSA, one of the toughest laws in the country. This is especially significant as it involves the UP BJP government headed by chief minister Adityanath, who has done his best to use all protests in the state to try and burnish his reputation as a ‘hardline’ CM who brooks no dissent. The state is set to vote early next year. Adityanath has been in office for over nine years now.

The Allahabad high court, in its latest judgment dated September 2, 2026, while quashing the detention of student activist Aakriti Chaudhary, came down heavily on the conduct of Gautam Buddha Nagar DM Roopam, who, earlier in May 2026, had signed on the detention order of Chaudhary and journalist Satyam Verma under the National Security Act (NSA), 1980 in connection with violence during the worker’s protests.

The division bench of the high court, comprising Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Achal Sachdev, while pointing out flaws in the prosecution's theory which relied upon the state’s version that ‘the petitioner along with her other associates had hatched the conspiracy for both Manesar and Noida under the guise of labour unrest’, commented on the right of a citizen to protest which comes under the purview of the right to freedom of speech and expression under the Indian Constitution.

The judgment while commenting on the fundamental right to gather and participate in a protest stated:

“In this case, this Court has seen from the material on record that the petitioner has called for citizens in support of the labourers and to agitate for their rights. There is no material to reflect that such agitation will have to be violent or challenging the authority of the State. The freedom of speech and expression extends to coming out on the streets and agitating a cause, and gathering peacefully without arms or without threat to the public order…. Preventing people from gathering in public spaces or agitating their rights on the grounds of assumed breach of peace, would be throwing the baby out of the bath water. If such a view is taken by the State and approved by the Courts, it would lead to a cessation of the collective expression of opinion in public spaces.”

As reported by The Wire earlier, while Chaudhary has been named in 11 FIRs in connection with the April violence, she has been granted bail in five cases by the sessions court. Her family is now planning to move the high court to hear all remaining six cases.

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Since 2017, the UP administration under the regime of chief minister Adityanath has been at the forefront of invoking NSA in the immediate aftermath of protests across the state.

From slapping NSA charges against local Muslim youths in Mau district soon after the protests took place against the controversial Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) in December 2019, booking individuals including a Samajwadi Party volunteer under NSA in Bareilly during the Covid lockdown in 2020 despite no video or photographic evidence of the alleged violence, to invoking the draconian provisions of NSA yet again in 2022 in Kanpur against Muslim activist Hayat Zafar Hashmi as the UP Police tried to prop up an alleged ‘land jihad’ theory behind the agitation following remarks by the then BJP spokesperson Nupur Sharma against Prophet Muhammad, the police in Uttar Pradesh often come across as part of the state machinery which resort to using NSA as a tool for curbing dissent.

Also Read: ID Based on Anonymous Informant, Sudden Reference to 2009 Home Ministry Notification: Why NSA Case Against Satyam Verma Is Unconvincing

And therefore, remarks by the high court in an NSA case, particularly with an emphasis on the state’s role are significant and unprecedented as well. The high court's 15-page judgment states:

“The State must also realize that every society has its own tensions and its share of disagreements with the Government in the manner in which it functions and allowing agitations is like the safety valve in a pressure cooker, which ensures that the building up of pressure is released rather than preventing such agitations and bottling up feelings accumulated to such an extent that when people do spill out onto the streets, violence becomes inevitable and difficult for the Law Enforcement Agencies to control and contain."

The judgment reflects on the fact that Chaudhary, a 24-year-old graduate student from Delhi University’s Daulat Ram College didn’t have any criminal antecedents and had ‘called for citizens in support of the labourers and to agitate for their rights.’

Speaking to The Wire, advocate Charlie Prakash, who was among the team of four lawyers which represented Chaudhary at the Allahabad high court, said: “The state should learn a lesson from this judgment that an individual cannot be booked under NSA on frivolous charges and kept in detention for months. The court has not awarded compensation in an NSA-related case earlier. An FIR was filed in this case that led to the curtailment of liberty under Article 21, and was based on false allegations resulting in someone’s incarceration for five months.”

A 2023 study by Article 14 that looked into 101 NSA cases heard by the Allahabad high court over a nine-year period between 2010 to 2019 had concluded that ‘in general, detenus, innocent or otherwise, spent about 76% of their maximum period of detention under India’s restrictive preventive detention law, the National Security Act (NSA) 1980, before their petitions were finally disposed off.’ On an average, the analysis stated that, "the detenus had spent 314 days in detention before either a decision by the Allahabad High Court or the maximum possible period of detention lapsed.”

Citing examples of Javed Mohammad alias Javed Pump, who faced NSA charges in June 2022 following violence in Atala area of Prayagraj during protests against Nupur Sharma’s remarks and Dr Kafeel Khan who spent nine months in prison in 2020 after NSA was invoked reportedly for a ‘provocative speech’ at the Aligarh Muslim University, advocate Charlie Prakash further told The Wire, “Either NSA is being invoked repeatedly in cases when people ask questions from the state or the other usual approach of the State has been to carry out encounters which does not address systemic issues related to a crime.”

Importance of extracting a cost from Gautam Buddha Nagar DM

The high court has taken a strong exception to the decision of Gautam Buddha Nagar DM Roopam, who gave a go-ahead regarding slapping of NSA charges in this case based on the report submitted by the Uttar Pradesh police.

Roopam is the daughter of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar, who has drawn the ire of opposition, as reported by The Wire in April 2026, with as many as 73 Rajya Sabha MPs submitting a notice seeking his removal for the alleged “mass disenfranchisement” as part of the ongoing Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls.

In July 2026, a two-part investigative series by The Wire, based on the 170-page NSA proposal which was cleared by DM Roopam in the case of journalist Satyam Verma, revealed that Annexure no. 3 had been copied verbatim from a thread posted on X by a right-wing handle named ‘Chronology’, thus, raising questions on the police probe and whether it was done with due diligence.

Part-two of the series had also delved into some of the remarks by Roopam, which seemed to be based on speculation rather than material evidence.

“Such an environment of industrial growth has been impacted negatively because of irrational, obstinate and violent andolanjeevis like yourself, who owing to their vile mentality are involved in planning civil unrest as was seen in Haryana’s Manesar and Noida industrial unrest,” Roopam’s letter, dated May 12, 2026 had stated while elaborating on the grounds why NSA needs to be invoked in this matter.

Criticising the conduct of Gautam Buddha Nagar DM Roopam, the Allahabad high court judgment, while announcing that a compensation of Rs 5 lakh be given to Chaudhary, ended with these remarks:

“This Court also directs that the said amount must be recovered from the salary of the District Magistrate Gautam Buddha Nagar, who has passed this order of detention without application of mind and from all such other officers who may have been responsible, right down to the SHO of the Police Station, who had prepared the initial report warranting the detention of the petitioner under the provisions of the NSA.”

Going a step further, the court has also issued an order that this misstep, on part of the bureaucrat who acted upon documents including case diaries and annexures submitted by the Noida Police, be made a part of the report card of the concerned officials in the form of adverse remarks.

The high court stated:

“The displeasure of this Court against the conduct of the District Magistrate concerned and all such other officers of the police who were involved in preparing the dossier against the petition, be noted in their service records."

Lashing out at the district magistrate of Gautam Buddha Nagar as someone who is “guilty of violating her oath of allegiance”, and whose “casual and cavalier exercise of authority” as a representative of the bureaucracy through such “despotic conduct” may “reduce the State of Uttar Pradesh to an Orwellian Dystopia”, the judgment offered a word of caution to the bureaucracy and the police.

The high court judgment said:

“...there must also be a realisation that with great power come great responsibility and an expected introspection on the part of the bureaucracy as to whether such powers be resorted to, and to what extent. Else, in the words coined by Rudyard Kipling (spoken publicly by Stanley Baldwin) that "power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages", will ring true whenever the power is exercised by the bureaucracy in a cavalier manner, devoid of human sensitivity resulting in deleterious consequences for the citizen.”

Loopholes flagged in the government version

The judgment has also flagged multiple loopholes in the investigation by Noida Police that led to invocation of  NSA-related charges in the case.

1. Discrepancy between date of arrest and claim regarding when violence erupted: The high court judgment made a note of the fact that the petitioner, alleged to be an agent provocateur of violence that erupted on April 13, 2026 was arrested by the Noida Police on April 11 from near the Botanical Garden metro station at 5:30 pm, and locked up in Secor-39 Noida police station, followed by confinement in other police stations during the night “without any information being given by the police to petitioner’s friends or family”, while “riots commenced from April 13, 2026.”

“It is also the undisputed case of the State that she was taken into custody on 12.04.2026, as much it is undisputed by the State that the violence commenced only from 13.04.2026. Therefore, the only inescapable inference that can be drawn is that the petitioner was in custody of the Law Enforcement Agencies from 12.04.2026, while the violence erupted from 13.04.2026."

It was on April 12 when Chaudhary was produced before an executive magistrate and the Sector-142 police station had formally informed one of her friends about her arrest.

2. No link between WhatsApp chats and incitement of violence: The high court also referred to the fact that while the state relied upon the NSA order approved by Gautam Buddha Nagar DM, and produced the same before the court in the form of a counter affidavit, a particular WhatsApp message which appeared on page number 40 did not establish any direct link with violence as was witnessed on April 13.

Transcript of the said WhatsApp message sent from Chaudhary's number went something like this: “By arresting people who are sitting on a protest peacefully, the police are trying to instil fear while such action is illegal, all those who are watching this video, in order to stop such illegal action which amounts to suppressing the labourers, should gather in large numbers.”

The high court judgment while dispelling the notion that this WhatsApp message led to violence during the workers’ protests stated:

“... anyone who can see and read this message should come in large numbers to prevent the unlawful actions of the police and to stand in support of the labourers who are being exploited. Even if these lines are taken to be the gospel truth, there is no incitement for violence, at the most and at its worst, it is only calling for people to gather to protect the rights of the labourers and stand with them in solidarity against the unlawful and excessive use of the authority by the police.”

3. State unable to produce video/WhatsApp chat related to incitement of violence: While talking about a video clip submitted as evidence of the purported violence, the court reiterated the fact that time stamps related to the exchange of the said video clip establish that Chaudhary was arrested on April 11, hence, messages delivered later at her mobile number that day didn’t elicit any response.

Also Read: Special | Evidence Copied from Right-Wing Tweets, a Pro-Palestine Protest with Yechury-Karat: Inside the NSA Case Against Journalist Satyam Verma

The video clip of a gathering of people had been sent by Chaudhary to her friend and student activist Priyambada at 01:41 pm on April 11, to which Priyambada had responded by sending an emoji. Message sent later on Chaudhary's number at 05:56 pm went unanswered which led the court to accept the petitioner's version that she had been arrested by the police at 05:30 pm and the mobile was no longer with her.

While the judgment does not call out the police directly for an unprofessional investigation, it does manage to pose uncomfortable questions before the prosecution in connection with the material evidence which has been relied upon to build a case.

Thus, while making a note that there hasn’t been any link between April 13 violence and the video or WhatsApp chats presented so far, the high court remarked:

“The learned counsel for the State has not been able to show a single message from the WhatsApp chats between the Petitioner and her associates or any video clip which would reveal any incitement from the Petitioner, either evidently or by necessary implication, which would disclose that it was the involvement of the Petitioner and the conspiracy hatched by her that resulted in the violence which erupted from 13.04.2026, much after the Petitioner was taken into custody by the State on 11.04.2026 (as held by this Court).”

4. Discrepancy related to General Diary entry no. 37: Justice Atul Sreedharan, who was earlier posted at the Madhya Pradesh high court and had ordered that an FIR be registered against BJP’s Vijay Shah over his remarks against Colonel Sofiya Qureshi, specifically pointed out an instance in Chaudhary’s case when UP Police seemed to have been involved in presenting fudged-up records before the court.

The General Diary entry no. 37 dated April 12 which was recorded by the district unit under the Noida Police Commissionerate at 10:56 am mentioned the time of arrest as 10:20 am the same day. But the notice issued to Chaudhary under Section 130 of the Bhartiya Nyaya Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) on April 12 does not specify the time despite the document having purported signatures of her. This did raise eyebrows among the bench which figured that something was off between the general diary entry whose printed copy, instead of hand-written version, was attached along with the notice under Section 130 BNSS.

“Every action taken by the police associated with a particular thana is documented in the form of a diary entry. At times such daily logs also expose the wrongdoing committed by the police. In this case, while the arrest was carried out on April 11, it wasn’t revealed before the court with the police claiming to have recorded the statement on the day when FIR was registered on April 12, which is what led the court to ask question from the investigation agency”, said advocate Charlie Prakash, while talking to The Wire.

Justice Atul Sreedharan while reprimanding the prosecution side for presenting falsified documents remarked:

“Mentioning the G.D. number in the notice under Section 130 of the BNSS reveals that the Petitioner was already arrested and the procedure of giving a notice under Section 130 of the BNSS was ex post facto the arrest and nothing more than a sham. I agree with the view of brother Justice Achal Sachdev that the notice u/s. 130 of the BNSS was prepared after the arrest of the Petitioner and that is the reason why the time of issuance is not mentioned in the notice and its omission is deliberate. Answer was sought from the Ld. Counsel for the state with regard to visible fabrication in the record for which no answer is forthcoming from the Ld. Counsel for the State.”

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