Delhi High Court dismisses riot hate-speech pleas and says the petitions pick their targets

The Delhi High Court on Monday threw out a batch of petitions that asked for criminal cases and a special inquiry into speeches linked to the 2020 North-East Delhi riots and the 2019 violence at Jamia Millia Islamia. Justices Vivek Chaudhary and Manoj Jain said the record showed an element of political selectivity in who the petitioners wanted charged.

The pleas had sought FIRs against BJP leaders Anurag Thakur, Parvesh Verma and Kapil Mishra, and also against Sonia Gandhi, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi, Manish Sisodia, Amanatullah Khan and Akbaruddin Owaisi. They asked for a special investigation team or another independent inquiry into the riots, and for action against police officers the petitioners said had failed. One of the pleas was filed by Brinda Karat.

The bench said there was no exceptional circumstance that would justify the court ordering criminal cases. On the choice of names, the judges wrote that the record indicated political selectivity in the individuals and the speeches picked out for action. They added that they did not need, at this stage, to record a finding on the subjective motive of the petitioners. The distinction is deliberate. The court is willing to say the list looks selected. It is not willing, in this order, to say why the petitioners built it that way.

The 2020 riots in North-East Delhi left a large criminal docket that is still in trial courts. The High Court was not retrying those cases. It was being asked to open a fresh set of FIRs against politicians, and to supervise the police, on the strength of public petitions. Indian criminal procedure lets a citizen ask a magistrate for a direction to register a case. These petitions went higher, and asked a writ court to do that job across a named political list. The bench refused.

The names themselves show the spread the judges called selective. Thakur, Verma and Mishra are the BJP figures most often cited in accounts of speeches before the February 2020 violence. The Gandhi family, Sisodia, Khan and Owaisi are the names that appear in the counter-petitions. A batch that contains both lists can still be selective if each petition aims at one side and none of them asks the court to apply one standard to every speech in the file. That is the reading the order points to, without a finding on motive.

Karat's plea sits inside the same dismissal. A former CPI(M) member of Parliament asking for cases against ruling-party speakers is a political filing in the ordinary sense. The court did not single her petition out for a different result. It dismissed the batch. The line about selectivity covers the way individuals were targeted, not one party.

What the order does not do is clear any speaker. A refusal to order an FIR is not an acquittal. Trials already on the board continue. A later complaint, on a full record, can still go to a magistrate. The High Court has said this set of petitions did not show the exceptional case that would make a writ court direct registration. That is a threshold ruling.

The practical effect on Monday is that no new FIR comes out of these pleas, and no special team is appointed by this bench. Police officers the petitioners wanted proceeded against are not proceeded against on this order. The speeches remain where they were, in the public record and in whatever investigations already exist.

The sentence that will be quoted is the one on selectivity. The court saw a pattern in who was named and declined to turn that pattern into cases. The next move, if there is one, is an appeal or a fresh complaint on a narrower set of facts. The 5 October order closes this batch.