The Real Conspiracy behind the ‘Conspiracy’ of Delhi Riots
Savera
ON September 2, 2025, the Delhi High Court denied bail to former JNU student and activist Umar Khalid and eight others in a case related to the communal riots that took place in Delhi on February 23-26, 2020. This case is generally known as the ‘larger conspiracy case’ because it is concerned with an alleged conspiracy hatched by several activists to create a communal conflagration in the capital. These activists were involved in the widespread protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) brought in by the Modi government in 2019. It is alleged that these protests culminated in the deadly riots that engulfed several localities in North-East Delhi, leading to the killing of 53 persons, injuries to over 700 people and widespread burning of homes, shops and vehicles in largely lower middle class and working class residential colonies.
Reportedly, some 758 FIR’s were filed by the Delhi Police after the violence subsided. In March 2020, the ‘larger conspiracy case’ FIR was filed under which 18 students and activists were arrested on a slew of charges that included sections from the draconian anti-terrorist law, the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA). Six of these accused have got bail but the remaining 12 remain in jail over five years after the incident. These accused have repeatedly shuttled between lower courts, High Court and even Supreme Court pleading for bail but to no avail.
Seen together, the riots, the reaction of the police and authorities, the subsequent police investigations, the filing of cases including the fictional ‘larger conspiracy’ and then the courts’ dealing of the bail applications, and the fate of diverse individual cases, reveal a planned and devious attempt to put the reality on its head, shield the real culprits and punish political opponents of the Modi government. While BJP leaders that incited people against Muslims with the most nakedly communal slogans and appeals remain at large, the Muslim community or the activists involved with it have been blamed for deliberately inciting the riots in order to create problems for the Modi government and embarrass it during President Trump’s visit to Delhi. Let us unpack this conspiracy behind the ‘conspiracy’, starting with the bail denial.
SORDID SAGA
OF BAIL
By 2022, most of the accused in the conspiracy case had exhausted their bail pleas in the trial courts which had rejected all of them. So, they moved applications before the Delhi High Court. What followed was an unbelievable journey, summarised below, based on an expert’s study.
Hearings started in early 2023 before the bench of Justices S Mridul and R Bhatnagar and judgement was reserved on March 6, 2023. In July, a few of the cases were reopened to hear additional issues. But no judgement was forthcoming. Not to give an order for four months in a bail application is itself bizarre. But there was more to come. The Supreme Court Collegium recommended that Justice Mridul be transferred as Chief Justice of Manipur High Court. The government sat on this recommendation for three months and finally accepted it in October 2023. In cases where the judge gets transferred, the matter has to be heard all over again. So, the bail hearings started afresh after seven months. Experts have questioned why the Supreme Court Collegium did not tell the High Court to first clear the pending case.
Then, incredibly, matters got even worse. The bail pleas were listed for hearing before a bench of Justices S Kait and S Kaur on November 1, 2023. Some pleas were heard by January and judgement reserved while others continued till mid-2024. By August 2024 these pleas had been in process before the new bench for nine months but no judgement! Then the Supreme Court Collegium again entered the picture – it transferred Justice S Kait to MP High Court in September 2024 and the whole process started again. The matters were finally listed again on November 25, 2024 before a newly constituted bench. Why did the High Court benches take so long in a bail hearing? Why did the Supreme Court Collegium transfer the judges knowing full well that the bail pleas were under their consideration? The net result of this merry-go-round was that the Constitutionally guaranteed liberty of accused was left hanging in the air for two years by the High Court, with some active help of the apex court itself.
Mention must also be made of the fact that Umar Khalid filed a bail petition in the Supreme Court too, in May 2023. It was reportedly listed 14 times in nine months but nothing substantive happened, except that it was tagged with his other petition challenging legality of a certain section of the UAPA, and became lumped together with 9-10 other similar petitions. Ultimately, he withdrew the bail petition.
This is how the sad story stood on September 2, when the High Court bench finally gave its verdict: no bail. The Court felt that there were reasonable grounds to believe that the charges were prima facie true. Section 43D (5) of the UAPA lays down this, almost impossible to rebut, condition which was further solidified in a 2019 judgement by the Supreme Court in NIA v. Zahoor Ahmad Shah Watali where the Court held that “the materials/evidence collated by the investigating agency must prevail until contradicted and overcome or disproved by other evidence, and on the face of it, revealed the complicity of such accused”, as explained by Citizens for Justice & Peace (CJP). In 2022, in Union of India vs KA Najeeb, the same court read down this harsh definition and said that “prima facie true” is just one of the conditions to be considered and that if the applicant has spent a considerable time in jail then that too should be factored in. In the Delhi riots conspiracy case, the apex court appears to have accepted all the inferences drawn by the prosecution and stuck to the earlier Watali judgement while rejecting the bail pleas.
Which brings us to the case itself. What is the charge sheet against the accused saying that the judges found ‘prima facie true’? Let us look at that now.
THE CHARGESHEET
The first and main chargesheet in the case was filed on September 16, 2020, followed by four supplementary chargesheets filed till June 7, 2023. The case is now scheduled for arguments. A total of 897 witnesses are listed and the case may drag on for years.
An affidavit filed by the Delhi Police on July 13, 2020, in the Delhi High Court (WP(Crl) 566/2020) said that 53 persons were killed in the carnage of which 40 were Muslims and 13 Hindus (including one police head constable who happened to be a Hindu). The affidavit also says that 473 persons were injured in the violence. Analysis on the basis of names done by The Wire showed that 216 (45 per cent) were Hindu and 257 (55 per cent) were Muslims. The chargesheet says 581 people were injured.
According to the police, 468 shops, 185 homes, 19 places of worship, 485 two-wheelers, 94 three-wheelers and 168 four-wheelers were damaged or destroyed in the violence that was spread over 14 police station areas. The police claimed that out of 468 shops, 250 belonged to Muslims, 66 to Hindus and – strangely – owner was unknown for 152 shops. Similarly, of the 185 homes destroyed, 90 belonged to Muslims, 18 to Hindus and 77 were unknown. Of the 19 religious places damaged or destroyed, 13 belonged to Muslims and 6 to Hindus. The data does not give details for two of the most severely affected police station areas, with 42 per cent of damaged houses and 31 per cent of shops between them. Even with this deficient data, it is clear that the Muslim community bore the brunt of violence.
So, even by the deficient police records, more Muslims died or suffered injuries, more Muslim houses were damaged, more Muslim shops were damaged and more Muslim religious places were damaged. Yet, in the chargesheet, the Delhi Police has constructed a fairy tale which says that it was Muslims who had a plan to attack Hindus, and that the violence was the culmination of that plan. It blames ‘urban naxals’ and ‘jehadists’ for planning and implementing the whole thing, taking off from the anti-CAA movement that had been going on prior to the riots.
SHAH LAID DOWN
THE NARRATIVE
This narrative originated from none other than Home Minister Amit Shah even before investigations were completed. On March 11, 2020, barely two weeks after the communal carnage, Shah delivered a statement in Parliament, replying to a debate on the horrific violence that had shocked the capital – and the world – for its brutality and scale.
Shah defined the whole thing as manufactured by opposition parties who gave hate speeches, misled the minority community, and he described the violence in symmetrical terms – both communities suffered. Dismissing accusations of hate speeches by BJP leaders, Shah described what he thought were the ‘real’ hate speeches: Congress leaders at a rally on December 14, 2019, calling upon people to come out because it is a do or die battle. With this, he not only sought to build the version that it was really the opposition that incited violence but more significantly, he thus blamed the minority community for the violence. Forgotten were the hate speeches of Anurag Thakur and Parvesh Verma, forgotten was the infamous Kapil Mishra speech standing next to a senior police official, widely perceived as the spark that set off the violence. In fact, it was Shah himself who had set the stage by leading and managing the BJP campaign for Delhi’s Assembly elections, held two weeks before the communal carnage erupted. This campaign saw a relentless barrage of poisonous and divisive speeches, including the ones by Thakur and Verma. But that too was forgotten.
Following this line, Delhi Police too defined the conspiracy as being hatched from when the CAA was passed by Parliament. It has included the violence in Jamia Millia University from December 13 onwards (which included a brutal police attack on the students inside the campus) as part of the evolving conspiracy to create violence. Then, the narrative characterises dozens of dharnas held in Delhi against the CAA/National Register of Citizens as part of the plot, ultimately leading to the conspirators organising violence from February 23.
BJP HATE SPEECHES
FORGOTTEN
There were several instances of various BJP leaders making provocative and inflammatory statements in public during the campaign for Delhi Assembly elections which were held on February 8, 2020, that is, just a fortnight before rioting erupted. The BJP lost the elections badly to the Aam Aadmi Party. Some of the most well-known examples of hate speeches by BJP leaders during an incendiary election campaign are:
- On January 28, one of Delhi’s BJP MPs, Parvesh Verma, said in a videographed interview that if Shaheen Bagh-like dharnas were allowed, Muslims would very soon invade people’s houses and rape their sisters and daughters. This was widely reported and video clips circulated in media and social media.
- On January 27, minister in the Modi government, Anurag Thakur, encouraged inflammatory slogans (“shoot the traitors”) equating the anti-CAA protesters to traitors. This incident was widely reported with video clips.
Later, on February 23, former BJP MLA Kapil Mishra’s provocative speech at Maujpur (where rioting started) threatening that if police doesn’t clear the anti-CAA protesters, he and the people would take to the streets and do it, was made in the presence of a senior police officer. This was followed by an outbreak of stone-pelting that escalated into full blown arson, looting, assaults and killings within hours. On February 26, Justice Muralidhar of the Delhi High Court severely reprimanded the Delhi Police for claiming that they had not seen the speech video and asked them to consider filing an FIR against Mishra. That very evening, he was transferred from Delhi High Court, and the new Bench allowed more leeway to the police. Far from holding Kapil Mishra responsible, the charge-sheet merely records that Kapil Mishra denied making any provocative speech.
Apart from these well-known cases, various groups of Hindu fundamentalists had been actively propagating hatred towards Muslims during the Delhi election campaign. These and other newly formed groups, especially on Facebook and WhatsApp, were reported to have served to mobilise Hindus who wanted to create violence in North-East Delhi. A few of them have been documented in some FIRs/chargesheets filed by Delhi Police in connection with the violence but usually portrayed as defensive groupings, though their violent intentions are very clear from the records.
In the voluminous chargesheet, every step of the chronology of events is sought to be validated by 39 anonymous or “protected” witnesses. This device is available to the police under Section 44 of UAPA . Considering that the bulk of the other named witnesses are police personnel themselves, these anonymised witnesses are the foundation of this conspiracy case.
So, the question that arises is this: has the Delhi Police carried out a fair and impartial probe or has it been guided by the political bosses in framing the violence as a conspiracy only of the ‘urban naxal-jehadi’ nexus that the present government sees behind everything? Recall that in the Bhima-Koregaon case too, several liberal human rights activists have been arrested and a fairy tale of conspiracy to create violence has been cooked up. The Delhi violence ‘conspiracy’ sounds similar. There is an abiding obsession of the RSS/BJP with ‘urban naxals’. As recently as March 2025, PM Modi asserted that naxals were taking roots in urban areas and infiltrating political parties. In October last year too, he had made a similar statement, explaining that their purpose is to destabilise the country and deter investors. Back in 2018, RSS supremo Mohan Bhagwat had released a Hindi booklet entitled “Kaun Hain Urban Naxal?” with wild assertions and slander against what they perceived as naxals. Using this bogey to hide its own true face of bigotry and violence has become a common device for the RSS/BJP. And the institutional capture effected by the RSS has facilitated the use of law enforcement machinery and even judicial arms to take this forward.
