Allahabad High Court quashes NSA order on Akriti Chaudhary and awards Rs 5 lakh

The Allahabad High Court on 2 September quashed the National Security Act detention of Akriti Chaudhary, a 25-year-old Delhi University history graduate from Durgapur, and directed the Uttar Pradesh government to pay her Rs 5 lakh. Justices Atul Sreedharan and Achal Sachdev, hearing her habeas corpus petition, described the police account as a “concocted story” and the NSA order as arbitrary. They said she should be released if no other case required her arrest. Other cases do. She is named in 11 FIRs at five Noida police stations. She remains in Kasna jail in Gautam Buddha Nagar.

Chaudhary was picked up on 11 or 12 April, depending on which police note is read, around the Noida workers’ protest over minimum wages. The state says she was arrested at 10:56 a.m. on 12 April and that a notice went out under Section 130 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita. The family says she was taken on 11 April. The NSA order followed on 13 May. By then she had already spent a month in ordinary custody. The preventive law then kept her inside without the usual bail clock.

Police alleged she instigated arson and stone-pelting and called her, with Lucknow writer Satyam Varma, a main conspirator. The FIRs list rioting, attempted murder, arson, vandalism, damage to public property and conspiracy. One police note cited a book recovered from her, “Great Martyrs of the Indian Revolution,” and called it controversial literature. The bench asked the government a narrower question: where was it recorded that she told people to throw stones or to set vehicles on fire? On Tuesday the court had asked for video. On Wednesday it quashed the detention.

Senior advocate Colin Gonsalves appeared for her. Counsel Charlie Prakash said the compensation direction was part of the oral order. Additional government advocate Nitesh Kumar Srivastava confirmed the quashing and did not discuss the money. The signed order had not been uploaded when the first reports moved. That gap matters for the Rs 5 lakh, which will need an operative paragraph before the treasury can pay it.

The NSA finding does not erase the 11 FIRs. Her lawyer Manik Gupta said she has bail in four of them. The Times of India put the bail count at five. Either way, several cases still hold her. The court’s line that she should walk free “if arrest was not warranted in any other case” is the standard saving clause. Noida police can keep her on the remaining charges without the NSA. What they cannot do, after Wednesday, is hold her on a preventive order the high court has struck down.

The April protest produced a wider file. Reports put 15 FIRs and at least 60 people in jail at the peak. Minimum-wage marches in the industrial belt often end in a night of stone-throwing and a month of charges. What is less common is the use of the 1980 Act against a student five weeks later. The bench’s language (“concocted,” “arbitrary,” “vague”) is a warning to the district magistrate who signed the NSA papers, not only to the station house officers who wrote the first FIRs.

Chaudhary is a history graduate, not a current law student, in the High Court’s telling. Some earlier reports called her a DU law student and labour activist. The factual core is the same: a 25-year-old from West Bengal, living in the Noida-Delhi circuit, named as an organiser after a wage protest turned violent. The state wanted the NSA to keep her out of that circuit. The court said the paperwork did not support that step.

What happens next is procedural. The government can challenge the quashing in the Supreme Court. It can also let the 11 trial courts run. Chaudhary’s lawyers will convert the remaining FIRs into bail orders if they can. The Rs 5 lakh, if the signed text matches the oral direction, is a cost the state will pay for a detention the bench would not uphold. The larger cost sits in the record: a high court has now said, in open court, that this NSA file was built on a story it would not accept.