Sometime around eleven o'clock Sunday night, an emergency call went out. Between 30 and 40 individuals were reportedly detained at a location in Najafgarh, in southwest Delhi, with the group understood to include five or six minors and a number of people who reported sustaining injuries. A notification reached legal professional associations shortly thereafter.
Chaudhary, a litigator practising independently in Delhi, forms part of a volunteer legal network that has maintained round-the-clock operations over recent days to provide support to people detained during protests in the capital against chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. In his own words, the rapid-response system the network built for the legal community was functioning, though ideally no such mechanism would be necessary.
Convening a special Sunday session, the Supreme Court directed authorities to release any peaceful, unarmed demonstrators held outside lawful procedure and to bring metro, rail, and internet services back to normal operation. Detentions and arrests continued at a steady pace.
Roughly a hundred individuals — among them All India Students' Association president Neha Bora and Communist Party of India (Marxist) member of parliament John Brittas — were detained by authorities in the Connaught Place area on Sunday evening. On Saturday, officers set up checkpoints across routes leading into central Delhi, where a large number of people were held before they could proceed. Among those taken into custody were figures holding leadership roles in both student organisations and political parties.
Chaudhary recounted how his work on behalf of detainees took shape during the July demonstrations, when crowds gathered calling for the then education minister Dharmendra Pradhan to step down — an effort he said he undertook without support at the outset. Several attorneys working independently made contact, and from those connections a collective took shape.
The organisation fields a legal team estimated at somewhere between 70 and 80 attorneys, stationed across five jurisdictions — Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, Assam, and the Delhi National Capital Region. Through each lawyer's personal ties — former classmates, professional contacts, and friends — the network can route an alert to whichever member happens to be closest to a given location, a function Chaudhary described as essentially a way of identifying which lawyers are nearby rather than a traditional emergency response system.
Phone numbers are passed around on WhatsApp and Instagram by the group, accompanied by a pair of brief messages. One of the two documents lays out steps a person should follow upon being taken into custody. One advises them to capture footage of the bus and record its registration number if they witness another person being taken into custody. Those held in custody are typically requested to share their real-time location within protest-related WhatsApp groups they belong to, along with their name and the number of passengers travelling with them.
Accounts filtering through to the group paint an uneven picture, Chaudhary noted. Complaints point to mistreatment occurring within detention facilities rather than during the arrest process itself. Accounts from within a number of detention facilities described people being shoved and sustaining injuries.
Chaudhary outlined patterns of repeated grievances during the session. One concern raised was that individuals were taken into custody before arriving at the demonstration venue, or in locations where the prohibitory provisions under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita had no legal standing — a form of pre-emptive detention that a legal observer described as falling outside the bounds of what the law permits. Chaudhary reported that those held in detention were left without meals across extended intervals, adding that the practice fell outside legal boundaries.
Around twenty to twenty-two young men who had made their way to Delhi for the demonstration were apprehended near Anand Vihar and confined inside a building. Food — bananas only — was all that was provided to them until around half past two in the afternoon, and access to their mobile phones was removed. Among those encountered at a detention facility on the outskirts of Delhi were children, while a number of people released from custody bore visible injuries.
A protocol was put in place by the group in response to the pattern whereby complaints about mistreatment tend to come forward only once a detainee has been freed. Whenever a lawyer is on hand at the point of a detainee's release, securing a Medico-Legal Certificate forms part of that attorney's responsibility. Under a procedure set out for such situations, written notification of any complaint — delivered by hand to the station house officer and acknowledged with a receipt — forms the required first step for legal representatives.
When the station house officer does not accept the complaint, the lawyer captures an image of it on the desk and forwards that photograph by email to the station, with Delhi Police headquarters included in the copy.
Chaudhary identified obtaining a court hearing on a Sunday morning as the primary barrier to gaining legal entry. Access to detainees by legal representatives was barred, and a number of those who attempted to reach them faced detention themselves. Conditions on Sunday proved noticeably less turbulent than the day before.
Chaudhary noted that experienced legal counsel had been brought into the matter, with court proceedings against Delhi Police and the Union home ministry under consideration, and added that the issue was not one to be set aside — describing it as a concern that would persist beyond the present day if left unaddressed.
