Delhi riots case: Court quashes order for fresh investigation against Kapil Mishra

A Delhi sessions court on Monday set aside a trial court’s direction to the Delhi Police to conduct a fresh investigation into the alleged role of Law Minister and BJP leader Kapil Mishra in the 2020 North-East Delhi riots, terming the earlier order “fundamentally flawed, illegal and improper”.

Special Judge (PC Act) Dig Vinay Singh of the Rouse Avenue Courts quashed the April 1 order passed by Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM) Vaibhav Chaurasiya. “It is set aside regarding the direction for further investigation into the incident mentioned in paragraph 2 of the application, which is referred to as the ‘first incident’ in the impugned order”, the court directed.

The trial court had passed the order on a plea filed by Mohammad Ilyas, a resident of Yamuna Vihar, who sought registration of a first information report against Mishra. Ilyas alleged that he had seen Mishra and others blocking a road in Kardampuri and destroying vendors’ carts during the riots, and that a Delhi Police DCP was standing beside Mishra at the time.

In his order, Magistrate Chaurasiya had raised sharp questions over the police investigation, observing that the probe into the conspiracy behind the riots was riddled with “many questionable assumptions, guesswork and interpretations”. He said that the police theory portraying the riots as a pre-planned conspiracy by anti-Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) protestors was built on weak premises.

“Once these flaws are outlined, therefore the theory goes off and so does the lens with which prosecution seeks to interpret the facts,” the Magistrate had said. He had also noted that the police’s argument that women were placed in front of the anti-CAA protests to force restraint by police and enable mass-scale violence “can be interpreted otherwise”.

Both Mishra and the Delhi Police had challenged the order before the sessions court, which stayed it on April 9 and pronounced its final ruling on Monday.

The sessions court held that the Magistrate had no authority to direct further investigation in a matter already under trial. “The Ld ACJM could not have ordered such a further investigation because FIR No 59/2020 was already under trial following the submission of a final report. Under Section 193(9) of the BNSS, such a further investigation could not have been ordered by the Ld ACJM after the matter had been taken cognizance of by the Ld Special Judge,” the court said.

Justice Singh added that while the Magistrate could not have ordered a fresh probe in an already cognised case, he was legally empowered to direct registration of a separate FIR if the alleged incident was distinct. “Even if Kapil Mishra’s role, concerning conspiracy, was investigated, and the incident, as alleged by the complainant, was not probed, a separate FIR could have been directed, and this would have been legally permissible. However, this required a specific finding that there was no connection between the incident alleged by the complainant and the investigation in FIR No 59/2020 and that the complaint disclosed a cognizable offence that requires the collection of evidence by the police,” Justice Singh observed.

The court, accordingly, quashed the trial court’s order for further investigation, bringing relief to Mishra and the Delhi Police.