This is the second article in The Wire’s series ‘The Forced Guilt Project', supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. Read the series: Part I

Alappuzha/Belagavi/Bengaluru/Kochi/Kolkata/Malda/Mumbai/Nanded/New Delhi/Parbhani/Patna: It was the winter of 2019. Rakesh Chaudhary, then 24 years old, had managed a small loan from friends and relatives and set up a modest fish and vegetable business in Bettiah village in Bihar’s West Champaran district. The business thrived and his parents were convinced Chaudhary was now both old and responsible enough to get married. Things, however, didn’t go as planned. Just days before his gauna ceremony – a ritual after which the bride moves to the groom’s home – Chaudhary was arrested. The National Investigation Agency (NIA) had named him as the fifth accused in a case of fake currency procurement.

The problem began when Chaudhary’s maternal uncle, Mannalal, imprisoned at the Presidency Correctional Home in Kolkata for a separate fake currency case, urgently summoned Chaudhary for a jail visit. He agreed. But when he returned to Bettiah in February 2019, the NIA accused him of working as a “courier” in a fake Indian currency notes (FICN) case.

Mannalal was soon moved to the Adarsh Central Jail in Beur, Patna. The other three accused in the FICN case – Shahnawaj Shaikh, Selim Sk, and Kamirujjaman – were also jailed here, as was Chaudhary. “Inside jail, I only knew my uncle. And he, I thought, was responsible for landing me in trouble, so I stayed away from him. The other three were hostile towards me,” Chaudhary recalls.

Between May 2019 (when he was arrested) and January 2022, the case barely made any progress. “On some days, when an escort party was available, they would ferry us to the court. The judge would simply fix the next date (for the hearing) and we were sent back to jail again.” Chaudhary’s then lawyer Wasif Khan describes the hearing as a “mechanical exercise”. “The judges rarely even look up to see who is produced before them. [Nobody is checking] if the [incarcerated] person is in good condition, if he has any complaints or any requests, if he has a lawyer to defend him. Just nothing,” Khan says.

In January 2022, however, things suddenly began to change. Choudhary and his co-defendants were summoned to the jailer’s office, a space typically off-limits to prisoners. Here, they were made to sit on the floor in a row. “Then, three men walked in,” Chaudhary recalls. He knew them as NIA officials – he had seen them at the time of his arrest and a few times in court, but had never interacted with any of them.

The men carried a stack of blank papers, Chaudhary says. “They asked us if we could read and write Hindi. We nodded.” Then, the three men, he claims, explained their case in detail and the possible punishment for the crime they were charged with. “They told us we would spend at least 10 years in jail.” The blank papers were for writing down brief confessions and signing them.

One of the NIA officials then made an offer: “Accept the crime and we will have the sentence negotiated with the court. In all, we can settle for five years.”

It was not a polite offering for the accused to plead guilty; “it was a veiled threat,” Chaudhary says. Since each of them had already spent over three years in prison, four out of the five readily gave in. Chaudhary was the only one who didn’t. “They told me that I will never be released on bail and that I will rot in jail for decades.” But Chaudhary says he was prepared for the worst now. “I had already spent three years in jail in a case I was not involved in. How much worse could the situation get?”

Finally, when Chaudhary stuck to his decision, he was separated from the rest. On January 22, 2022, the others were asked to write identical lines in their own handwriting. The superintendent of the Adarsh Central jail, whose name Chaudhary doesn’t recall, was allegedly also present. “I am sorry for the crime we have committed. Please consider my confession and take a lenient view while deciding on the quantum of punishment,” their applications read.

Three years after the arrest, the defendants had made a petition to plead guilty. There had been no trial yet. The court had not even framed the charges – a stage before the actual trial begins. NIA judge Gurinder Singh Malhotra readily accepted their guilty pleas. Three out of four who pleaded guilty were Muslim men.

In the judgment, Judge Malhotra stressed on the term ‘may’ mentioned in Section 229 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which reads, “If the accused pleads guilty, the judge shall record the plea and may, in his discretion, convict him thereon.” In the order, Malhotra says, “[The word] ‘may’ means that even after the accused persons plead guilty the court should make itself clear that the accused persons are pleading guilty unmistakably, unequivocally and without any inducement, threat or promise.” The judge, however, did not investigate why four individuals unanimously pleaded guilty, with identical applications. The role of NIA officials in the guilty plea process was not examined either. Neither did the judge inquire why Chaudhary had not gone the guilty plea route, like his co-defendants.

Chaudhary, who declined the NIA’s offer, was eventually released on bail on April 12, 2023.

In response to The Wire’s questions about this case, the NIA spokesperson categorically denied the NIA ever meeting any accused persons in jail. “Our officers don’t meet any accused person without a proper court order,” the agency’s spokesperson said.

Six months after his release, Chaudhary met this reporter in Patna. Looking back, he says, he no longer knows if he should hold on to the sense of pride he felt for not giving in to the NIA’s pressure, or whether he should instead consider that act foolish. “The small business I had painstakingly built lies in ruins. I still have to face trial. My wife has gone back to her parents and says she won’t return unless I get proper accommodation or the financial ability to take care of her.”

Choudhary’s legal fight continues.

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Over a thousand kilometres away, in Parbhani district of Maharashtra’s Marathwada region, Mohammed Raisuddin had to fight an almost identical battle with the NIA. A teacher at a zilla parishad (local self-government body) school, Raisuddin was arrested on August 7, 2016, for his alleged role in banned terror outfit Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). He was 37 years old then.

Raisuddin was one of four persons arrested in what the Maharashtra state Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) described as a “sophisticated terror module”. The case was considered so serious that two months into the investigation, it was transferred from the state agency to the central agency NIA.

This transition from the ATS and the NIA was of a “strange” kind, Raisuddin recalls. “The ATS had projected us as the most dreaded beings in their custody. It claimed that explosives were recovered from one of the arrested persons too. But as soon as the NIA took over, the agency was no longer interested in running the trial. Instead, they began making offers for a lesser quantum of punishment if we agreed for guilty plea deals,” Raisuddin says. After six years of incarceration, two out of the four persons arrested – Naserbin Yafai and Mohammed Shahed Khan – gave in.

The other two, Raisuddin and Iqbal Ahmed, stayed firm.

The NIA alleged varying degrees of involvement by the four men in a terrorist act – from Yafai directly communicating with "handlers" in Iraq and Syria to Khan procuring materials to assemble an Improvised Explosive Device (IED). Raisuddin allegedly "showed interest" in joining ISIS. According to the NIA, Raisuddin had passed on a handwritten baith, or oath of allegiance to ISIS’s ‘caliph’ in Arabic, expressing his "interest" in joining the terrorist group.

By the time Yafai and Khan agreed to go the guilty plea way, it was no longer a foreign term. Yafai and Khan finally pleaded guilty around mid 2022. The duo made an identical, four-line application. “I feel guilty of the crime the NIA has accused me of,” one of the lines in their applications read.

Their original lawyer Khan Ishrat Ali Azhar Ali, who represented them until this point, withdrew from the case. Advocate Khan says Yafai and Khan took the decision to file a guilty plea application without his knowledge and that had he known of it, he would have tried to dissuade them. “I was engaged by Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind, an NGO, to handle the case. Since the NGO only takes up cases of those who are innocent and wrongly implicated, there was no question of proceeding with the case,” advocate Khan said.

When asked what he truly thought about Yafai and Khan’s case and whether he believed the duo were involved in the crime, advocate Khan posed a counter question: “Is it not interesting that only those individuals charged by the NIA seem to be confronted by their conscience and want to plead guilty? Do you see this happening so frequently with any other agency in the country?”

Once advocate Khan resigned, a new lawyer named Vasant Prabhu was promptly brought in. Prabhu’s appointment, advocate Khan says, was made on the NIA’s suggestion. He claims that Prabhu was given a “limited briefing” to only tell the court that the two accused persons have agreed to plead guilty. The matter was disposed of within a day.

The special NIA court under judge Dinesh Kothalikar convicted them and sentenced them to seven years’ imprisonment, under Sections 18B, 20, 38, 39, 13 and 16 of the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act and Section 5 of the Explosive Substances Act. Punishments under some of these sections extend up to life imprisonment. But Yafai and Khan, who had already spent over six years in jail, had to spend a year more to complete their seven-year punishment. They were both released in mid 2023.

Just weeks after the NIA court convicted Yafai and Khan, Raisuddin was granted bail by the Bombay high court. This bail order was based on the merits of the case and not on any technical loopholes. The Bombay high court raised questions over the veracity of the letter that Raisuddin purportedly wrote to join the ISIS.

“Totality of the material gathered by the investigation agency qua appellant-accused and presented before us does not prima facie point out the involvement of the appellant-accused in the aforesaid offences,” Justices V.G. Bisht and Revati Mohite Dere observed in the 37-page bail order.

When asked about this case, and how two accused persons were released on bail on merits even when two other accused persons booked under identical charge had already opted for guilty pleas and the judgement was pronounced, the NIA spokesperson said, “The court must have released them but it is important to remember their trial still continues. The higher courts don’t impede the trial courts from carrying out its duties (in this case, conducting the trial).”

It has been over nine years since the case was registered. On the first Tuesday of every month, Raisuddin and Ahmed have to travel around 600 km from Parbhani to Mumbai to appear at the NIA office, to satisfy one of their bail conditions. “Considering our financial situation, the NIA court has agreed to conduct a trial on the same day as our appearance before the NIA officials. But that also means only one or a maximum of two witnesses are examined every month,” Raisuddin says. So far, only 14 out of the 40 prosecution witnesses have been examined. At this rate, the case will take at least two or three more years of hearings.

Until then, Raisuddin, although confident of an acquittal in the case, cannot return to his teaching job. As a government employee who is facing terror charges, his employment is under suspension for the time being. Ahmed, who does odd jobs to support his family of five, has been struggling to find stable employment and is relying on community donations.

Ahmed says the NIA continues to entice him with guilty plea offers. “They say Raisuddin has a government job to fall back on, his siblings are all educated and have decent jobs. So he can afford to fight this battle. But why are you fighting back, they ask me.” But for Ahmed, just like Raisuddin, this fight is not merely about livelihood. “I have two very young children. If I give in to their [the NIA’s] demands, how do I face my children?” he asks.

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Chaudhary, Raisuddin and Ahmed’s are not isolated cases. Over the past year, The Wire has examined NIA data, travelled across different states and conducted a series of interviews with individuals charged by the agency, their lawyers and several NIA officials. What emerged from this research was that guilty pleas are by design, and the NIA is the architect of this carefully crafted pattern.

“The oral narratives of the NIA accused and a combination of other factors suggest the fell hand of the NIA lies behind the so-called voluntary pleas of guilt – a nudge if not outright pressure,” says Nitya Ramakrishnan, a senior advocate with extensive courtroom experience of terrorism trials. “The Herculean challenge of mounting a defence to an NIA prosecution provides a hugely amenable backdrop for such a nudge. The choice as it appears to those in jail is quick liberty in exchange for a guilty plea. It’s a different matter that these hopes are sometimes belied.”

Most of those whom The Wire interviewed and who have opted to plead guilty claimed their case was making no progress for years, in some cases for close to a decade. NIA officials had approached them with an offer that clearly outlined the expected punishment – something that only a judge should be able to decide. Once they agreed, NIA officials helped them draft their guilty plea applications. When their original lawyers withdrew due to the sudden move to guilty pleas, the NIA helped them find new lawyers to represent them. Throughout the process, however, the NIA remained in the background, making the process look independent.

For this series, The Wire studied cases right from the NIA’s inception in 2009 through to the end of September 2025. In over 15 years, the NIA has registered 633 cases. By the end of September 2025, the agency has either partially or fully concluded trials in 133 cases, which amount to only one-fifth of the total cases registered in 15 years.

Of these, the NIA followed a complete trial procedure – examining witnesses and presenting evidence in court – in 79 cases. Some of these trials resulted in convictions, while others ended in acquittals. As terror cases typically involve multiple accused, the trial is some of these cases are only partially concluded, with a few accused still facing trial. In the remaining 54 cases, defendants opted for guilty pleas. This means, the NIA secured convictions in roughly two out of every five cases through guilty pleas.

The NIA’s pattern has become predictable to both incarcerated individuals and their lawyers. Akram Khan, a Delhi-based human rights lawyer, says that once cases are registered, the initial four to five years are simply a “wait-and-watch” period. “The trial just doesn’t begin,” Khan says, drawing from his nearly decade-long experience handling NIA cases. He adds that the NIA’s strategy shifts at this point. “After four or five years of languishing in jail as pretrial detainees, guilty plea offers are made [to the accused]. These offers are almost exclusively made to defendants from the Muslim community,” he claims.

The Wire reviewed many of the cases where accused persons have pleaded guilty, and Khan’s observations are supported by the evidence. Out of the 54 cases where the accused pleaded guilty, in as many as 49 – or 90% of – cases, the defendants belonged to the Muslim community.

The NIA rejected any suggestion of communal bias in its operations. “We do not view accused persons through the lens of their community,” the NIA’s spokesperson told The Wire. “We investigate their individual roles and place the evidence before the court. The decision to plead guilty is entirely that of the accused and is the discretion of the court. We have no control over it, nor can we explain why persons from any particular community choose that route.”

Those who pleaded guilty were either booked for their alleged roles in terror activities or for dealing in fake Indian currency. The terror cases, in particular, were of a serious nature and in most cases, they were booked under sections of the UAPA which attracted punishment up to life. But once the accused persons had pleaded guilty, the NIA didn’t press for higher punishment and the courts too settled for punishment ranging anywhere between five and eight years.

Guilty pleas were only prevalent in northern states in the initial years of the NIA’s functioning, but slowly spread to the rest of the country. Lawyers practicing in Delhi courts say when they take up an NIA case, they have a fair understanding of the stage at which the agency is likely to approach the accused persons and “strike a deal”. “It has become so obvious that when we take up cases, we explain this as a part of the legal briefing to our clients. That the case will drag on for many years and the NIA will try to entice them with the guilt plea option in lieu of their freedom,” advocate Sarim Naved says. While some lawyers have managed to win their clients’ trust and fight the case till the end, in some cases, the accused simply give in.

The lawyers that The Wire spoke to also say it is not only the role of the investigating agency that needs to be scrutinised but also the way the court functions in these cases. The Wire spoke to S. Abdul Khader Kunju, who served as a special public prosecutor in NIA cases for over four years before he parted ways with the agency. Kunju speaks of the “disturbing trend” of not starting the trial sooner in the UAPA cases. “The police, under the UAPA law, get up to 180 days to just complete their investigation and file a chargesheet. Even after the chargesheet is filed, the courts don’t start the trial for years and such a crucial issue gets overlooked even by the higher judiciary,” says Kunju. This despite the fact that under Section 19 of the NIA Act, special courts are mandated to hold proceedings on a day-to-day basis on all working days. Kunju observes that courts have now accepted pleading guilty as a "shortcut", even though the CrPC clearly mandates that judges should exercise their discretionary powers while adjudicating guilty plea applications. His book, Commentaries on the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act, 1967, the National Investigation Agency Act, 2008, and Other Allied Acts, is among the few exhaustively researched books that highlight the functioning of both the NIA and the special courts.

The fallout of the option has not always worked in the favour of the accused hoping for a quick release from prison, or a quicker release than it might have been if they chose to fight it out. In a 2019 case,  the NIA arrested six Kashmiri men – Sajjad Ahmed Khan, Bilal Ahmed Mir, Muzaffar Ahmed Bhat, Ishfaq Ahmed Bhat Mehraj-ud-din Chopan and Tanveer Ahmed Ganie – and accused them of being “highly radicalised Over Ground Worker[s] (OGW) of Jaish-e-Mohammed ("JeM"), a proscribed terrorist organisation, which had carried out several terrorist acts in India”.

After over three and a half years in jail, with no concrete progress in their case, they pleaded guilty.

Pleading guilty had by then become a common occurrence and they had seen many people move an application and in return, get shorter sentences. “It was suggested…” and “...we too agreed,” says one of those men. But contrary to their expectations, a special judge sentenced five of them, all first time offenders, to life imprisonment. One of them  was sentenced to five years rigorous imprisonment.

“We assumed the court would consider our voluntariness at the time of deciding the quantum of punishment.” Once they had pleaded guilty, there was no going back as the nature of their conviction came under Section 375 CrPC, which specifies that “if any accused pleads guilty and is convicted on the basis of such plea of guilt, there shall be no appeal, except as to the extent or legality of the sentence”.

Soon after, the five life convicts appealed against the quantum of punishment before the Delhi high court. On May 20, 2024, taking into consideration their “candid” admission of “guilt” made at the first opportunity available to them, the high court reduced their sentence to 10 years, which they are still serving out.

In this case, the defendants, all Kashmiris, are held over 1,000 km away from their homes in Delhi’s prisons. Although the NIA has expanded significantly in recent years, with two zonal offices in Guwahati and Jammu and 21 branch offices across the country, the majority of cases are still handled by the agency’s headquarters in New Delhi. This means that accused individuals from other states, some facing significant language barriers, often find themselves in Delhi’s Tihar Jail.

The prolonged delays and plea bargain tactics not only affect the accused but also place immense strain on their families. Many defendants come from marginalised communities, and their incarceration often leaves families without primary breadwinners. Families face social stigma, particularly in cases involving terror charges, which can lead to isolation and discrimination. This is fertile ground for the success of any persuasion to enter a plea of guilt. Their families too are driven to support this option.

The family of one Kashmiri defendant, interviewed by The Wire, says that they played an active role in persuading him to file a guilty plea application. “After the abrogation of Article 370, the situation in Kashmir has been extremely tense. In such circumstances, traveling all the way to meet a son charged under terror laws became even more challenging for us. So, when the NIA approached my son with an offer to plead guilty, I urged him to accept their conditions,” the father says.

For many, the pressure to accept a plea deal stems not only from personal exhaustion but also from the desperate need to alleviate their families’ suffering, even at the cost of admitting guilt to charges they may not honestly admit to.

A plea of guilt in NIA prosecution has become such a norm, that families sometimes ask the NIA to facilitate the exercise on occasion. The Wire met Saifuddin Ahmed outside Patna’s special NIA court on August 7, 2023. His 25-year-old son Marghoob Ahmad Danish was arrested by the agency in August 2022 in a case involving Gazwa-e-Hind, allegedly a Pakistan-backed terror group. Danish, according to the NIA, created a WhatsApp group and added several Muslim men from the locality to it. The agency accused him of “radicalising impressionable youth” over various social media platforms for carrying out violent terrorist acts.

Raids were carried out across different locations and Danish was shown as a primary accused in the case. In all this, the NIA didn’t take into account a crucial aspect – Danish's mental and intellectual capacity. This reporter met Danish briefly outside the court. He was agitated that the escort police, who ferried him and several other accused from Patna jail to court, wouldn't let him use the toilet. Unable to control himself, Danish soiled his clothes.

At the time of his arrest, Danish was on a high dose of psychiatric medications, his father says. His lawyer Wasif Khan had brought up this aspect several times in his argument before the court.

On the day that The Wire met Ahmed, he was carrying Danish’s medical documents to court. It included Danish’s IQ assessment papers, carried out at All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Patna. As per the reports, Danish’s intellectual capacity falls between 70-75 points and the doctor’s assessment states that his mental ability is “definitely below average”. This standardised test indicates that a person with such a low IQ level is diagnosed as having “mental retardation”.

Ahmed, who worked as a labourer in Dubai for over a decade, had to leave his job and return to India to handle the case. Ahmed told The Wire that he had been requesting the NIA to make Danish “plead guilty” in the case. “I know it is an unfair thing to do to a child who can barely understand what really is happening with him. But as a father, I also want my child to return home safe,” he says.

Citing long incarceration and deteriorating mental health condition, in September this year, advocate Wasif Khan who represents Danish, moved a guilty plea application. “It is due to his mental health condition that his understanding of the gravity and consequences of his actions is limited and, therefore, his conduct reflects immaturity and misguidance rather than deliberate criminal intent,” a part of the application read, urging the court to “adopt a reformative and humanitarian approach” while accepting Danish’s confession of guilt.

On October 10, however, Danish suddenly withdrew his application for a guilty plea. No reason for this withdrawal was told to the court. “The trial is now expedited and 19 witnesses have been examined. As against the earlier decision to examine 45 witnesses, the NIA is now willing to restrict it to 22 witnesses. We are hoping that the trial is wound up in the coming two months,” advocate Wasif Khan said, refusing to comment on what prompted him to move the guilty plea application and then withdraw it within a month.

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Over the past few years, the NIA in Kerala too has successfully adopted the plea guilty model. Even in the most infamous ISIS cases, which later inspired the propaganda film The Kerala Story, the NIA managed a conviction against a few accused persons only after they pleaded guilty.

Thushar Nirmal, a Kochi-based human rights lawyer, calls the NIA a “manufacturing unit for convictions”. “The crime statistics of the NIA cannot be taken as actual data for crimes in India; similarly, the very high conviction rate achieved by the NIA does not reflect the actual work done by this so-called premium agency,” Nirmal says.

Nirmal’s office in Kochi is a busy space, as one would expect from any lawyer with a thriving practice. However, his clients, mostly arrested for their political convictions, also serve as his researchers and assistant lawyers. When this reporter visited Nirmal in April this year, Allan Shuaib, a young law student facing UAPA charges, was at the office. In 2019, Shuaib, then 20 years old, was arrested by the NIA for alleged Maoist links. He spent 10 months in incarceration, of which a few days were in solitary confinement at the Viyyur High Security prison. After his release, Shuaib resumed his studies and has since been assisting Nirmal in UAPA cases.

Within years of the NIA’s inception, the agency opened a unit in Kochi. Earlier, the cases here were handled by the NIA’s Hyderabad office. But as the number of cases increased in the state, several new officers were recruited and a new unit was set up in Kochi.

The NIA’s Kerala unit has handled diverse cases. Along with the most common ISIS cases, the agency is also handling an equal, if not greater, number of cases against alleged Maoists.

The Wire’s investigation found that the guilty plea route is followed mostly in terror cases involving Muslim accused and for those booked in fake currency cases. Not one person booked in a Maoist case has pleaded guilty so far – neither in Kerala nor anywhere else in the country.

While there can be no simple answer to why this is, Nirmal has a hypothesis. He says that, at least in Kerala, the NIA doesn’t approach anyone accused of Maoism with the guilty plea offer. “One, this could be an unwritten policy decision taken by the home department, or there could be a more nuanced political reason behind it,” Nirmal says. He argues that since Maoists work closely with the community, have established roots and operate with a certain level of political conviction, pleading guilty might not be a viable option.

But if political conviction was the only thing stopping alleged Maoists from pleading guilty, then would the same logic not extend in the cases of political activists from Kashmir or the Northeast, asks a Mumbai-based prisoners’ rights activist who is also facing trial under UAPA. The Wire’s research also shows that in a handful of cases, Kashmiri men and women, along with a few from Manipur and Assam, have opted for guilty plea options in recent years. Kashmiri separatist leader Yasin Malik is one such example. In 2022, Malik pleaded guilty to charges of criminal conspiracy and waging war against the state, and was sentenced to life imprisonment.

When asked to explain these contrasting trends, the NIA declined to engage. “As I mentioned earlier, to plead guilty or not is the decision of the accused and we do not maintain this kind of data,” the NIA’s spokesperson told The Wire.

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While the trend suggests that the NIA and special courts often function in tandem, there are a few instances where courts have gone against the wind, rejecting plea guilty applications. In 2017, five men – Mohammed Akram, Mohammed Ilyas, Mohammed Sadiq, Mohammed Muzzamil and Mohammed Irfan – submitted plea guilty applications, and agreed to having been a part of the banned terror organisation Laskhar-e-Tayyaba (LeT). The NIA court, however, rejected the applications, stating that the move did not appear to be made of their own free will. This was perhaps the first time such an application was both made and rejected in Maharashtra.  “The court’s view is the exact point. If not of their own free will, what persuasion would work on an under trial to embrace guilt? Unfortunately, fewer and fewer courts are asking this question,” notes Nitya Ramakrishnan.

Eventually in 2021, the NIA court in Mumbai convicted Akram, Sadik and Muzzamil and sentenced them to 10 years in jail. Ilyas and Irfan were acquitted of all charges. They had already spent nine years in jail by then.

Although this was a new development for an NIA court in Mumbai, Akram had already successfully pleaded guilty in another trial conducted by the NIA in Bengaluru for being a “member” of the LeT. In 2015, the court had accepted the guilty pleas filed by 13 persons, including Akram, and sentenced them to five years' imprisonment.

Similarly, when a few accused persons in the Mysuru Court blast case of August 2016 pleaded guilty, the NIA court in Bengaluru rejected their application stating that the accused persons had committed a “serious offence” that caused injuries to many people and hence can’t be shown leniency or given a chance to plead guilty in the case.

In the 2018 Bodh Gaya serial bomb blast case, three accused persons filed a plea of guilty before the trial court on December 10, 2021. The applicants — Paigambar Sheikh, Ahmad Ali, and Nur Alam Momin — stated that they had made up their minds to plead guilty so that they could “lead a healthy life and return to mainstream society”. Along with pleading guilty to their crimes, the accused also prayed for mercy on humanitarian grounds.

The application was moved in the first half of the day, and in the second half, the court pronounced the sentence, awarding them life imprisonment. The accused had pleaded guilty but were apparently unaware that the charges, particularly Section 121 of the Indian Penal Code (which had been added at the time of framing of charges), carried a mandatory life term.

Shocked by the outcome, they immediately appealed the sentence before the Patna high court.

The high court raised serious doubts about the “voluntariness” of the guilty plea and the manner in which the trial court had proceeded, terming the entire process a “miscarriage of justice”. The division bench of justices Rajeev Ranjan Prasad and Shailendra Singh observed that the application was “more in the nature of a mercy petition than a proper plea of guilt”.

“The learned trial court was required to give sufficient time to the accused persons to rethink, consult their lawyers, and understand the consequences of their admission of guilt, but that was not done. The entire exercise was completed in a single day, during the morning and afternoon sessions of the court,” the high court noted while setting aside the trial court’s judgment and sending the case back to the trial court for fresh proceedings.

In June early this year, the trio once again pleaded guilty. This time, they were given a day to reflect and tell the court that the application was moved voluntarily. They were sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment.

While the NIA’s overreliance on guilty pleas has inflated its conviction rate, what gets lost behind the glossy picture is the numerous stories of prolonged detentions, veiled threats and orchestrated plea deals. Behind this facade of effectiveness, the agency, in its decade and a half of existence, has systematically sidestepped judicial scrutiny by not even attempting to prove that the accused persons are guilty.

With inputs from Saranga Ugalmugle.

This article went live on December eleventh, two thousand twenty five, at zero minutes past eight in the morning.

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