Delhi High Court dismisses the batch of pleas on 2020 riot speeches and a Jamia probe

A Delhi High Court bench of Justices Vivek Chaudhary and Manoj Jain on Monday dismissed a batch of petitions that had asked for fresh investigations into the 2020 Northeast Delhi riots and the violence at Jamia Millia Islamia in 2019. The bench said the batch had been split in two, one part on the Northeast Delhi riots and one on Jamia, and that for the reasons in the judgment every petition was dismissed. The detailed judgment had not been released when the court rose.

The petitions were not one plea. Former Rajya Sabha member Brinda Karat and Jamiat Ulama-i-Hind had asked the court to order probes into alleged police inaction and alleged hate speeches by political leaders. Other petitioners had asked for investigations into alleged rioters, including a National Investigation Agency probe into alleged funding, and had named Congress leaders Sonia Gandhi and Rahul Gandhi among those they wanted examined. A separate strand sought an FIR route against BJP leader Anurag Thakur over remarks made in the weeks before the February 2020 violence. India TV reported that the dismissal also covered the request for a special investigation team.

The Indian Express filed the outcome as a breaking item at mid-morning and said more detail was awaited. That is the constraint on Monday's report. The operative line is the dismissal. The grounds are in a judgment the bench has written and not yet published. Until that text is up, claims about what the court accepted or rejected on speech, on police conduct, or on the limits of a writ petition are guesses.

The events the petitions pointed at are six years old. The Northeast Delhi violence of February 2020 killed 53 people, on the figure used in the claims litigation that followed, and ran across several days in neighbourhoods of the northeast district. The Jamia violence the second half of the batch concerns broke out in December 2019, during protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act, when police entered the university library. Both sets of facts have already produced criminal trials, claim commissions and earlier writs. Monday's batch was an attempt to reopen the investigation question, not the trials already under way.

What the dismissal does, in procedural terms, is close this docket. It does not acquit any accused in a trial court. It does not erase FIRs that already exist. It refuses the request that the High Court order new FIRs, or an SIT, or an NIA funding probe, on the petitions as framed. Karat's plea and the Jamiat plea fall with the rest. So do the pleas that named Gandhi and Thakur.

The next public document is the judgment. If the bench has held that the petitioners had an alternative remedy in the criminal courts, the political names in the prayers become irrelevant to the ratio. If it has held that the material did not make out a case for a court-ordered FIR, the speeches themselves remain a factual dispute outside this order. Either reading has to wait for the PDF. On Monday the only sentence the bench put in open court was that the petitions were dismissed.