Allahabad High Court voids a student’s NSA case and bills the Noida DM

The Allahabad High Court has quashed the National Security Act detention of Akriti Chaudhary, a 25-year-old Delhi University graduate held after a workers’ protest in Noida in April, and ordered Rs 5 lakh in compensation. The money is to be recovered from the salary of Gautam Buddha Nagar District Magistrate Medha Roopam and from every officer the court finds responsible, “right down to the SHO.”

Justices Atul Sreedharan and Achal Sachdev delivered the operative order on 2 September. The detailed reasons were released on 7 September. Chaudhary had spent nearly five months in preventive custody. The bench held that the detention violated Article 21 because the grounds lacked credible material and the order was passed “without application of mind.”

What the judges said about the magistrate

“The conduct of the District Magistrate, Gautam Buddha Nagar, who passed the impugned order, is worthy of derision,” the court wrote. It said Roopam “desired to set an example” out of the petitioner and to deter others from speaking in public for workers. It held that she was “guilty of violating her oath of allegiance.” In a passage that will travel farther than the rest of the judgment, the bench warned that “despotic” conduct by officers could turn Uttar Pradesh into an “Orwellian dystopia.”

The police file, the judges said, contained allegations without supporting material. A magistrate facing that file was expected to read it “threadbare,” ask whether ordinary criminal law was enough, and only then reach for a statute written for threats to public order and national security. Chaudhary had no prior criminal record. She is a history graduate who also teaches children in slums. Eleven FIRs were registered against her after the April protest. The NSA order sat on top of those cases.

How an NSA file is supposed to work

The National Security Act, 1980, lets a district magistrate detain a person without a trial for a defined period if the officer records that ordinary law will not do. Courts have said for decades that this power is narrow. The Noida file failed that test on the court’s reading: the police report did not show why a student at a labour march needed preventive detention rather than a charge sheet under the general law.

Personal costs follow that finding. Compensation from an officer’s salary is rarer than a quashing order. By naming the DM and the station house officer in the same recovery line, the bench has tied the first signature and the last signature to the same bill. Roopam is the daughter of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The judgment does not rest on that fact. The political world around the judgment will.

What the order does not do

It does not wipe the eleven FIRs. Those cases, if they still stand, will move in ordinary criminal courts. It does not bar the state from using the NSA tomorrow. It does say that a magistrate who uses it to “make an example” of a student can be made to pay. That is a different incentive than a paragraph of judicial displeasure that leaves the officer’s pay slip untouched.

Chaudhary is out of NSA custody. The Rs 5 lakh is a court’s price for five months. The larger file is the one the bench pointed at and did not try: how many other preventive-detention orders in the state were built on the same quality of police paper. That question now sits with the government that must recover the money, and with every DM who signs the next NSA file knowing this one ended with a deduction.