The petition ultimately asks the Supreme Court to confront not merely the legality of the Noida prosecutions (or lack thereof), but the police investigative culture that made them possible.

By

Mouli Sharma

The Shakambhari writ petition, one of several eponymous petitions filed in India’s courts of supposed justice by the imprisoned 60-year-old journalist Satyam Verma’s spouse, is an artifact of the nonsense the UP Police have made of the Noida workers’ protests of April 2026. This second installment of

GroundXero’s

five-part series examines allegations and public-domain evidence of the police’s persistent violations of investigative procedure in the case. It reminds us that there are two sets of laws for those who wear the uniform of the state in this country—and that neither appears to matter when the crimes committed are against a certain kind of citizen.

Twenty-two years ago, shortly after midnight on 11 July 2004, personnel from the 17th Assam Rifles forced their way into the home of the 32-year-old activist Thangjam Manorama Devi in Manipur. They had neither a search warrant nor an arrest warrant; indeed, there was not even an FIR against her. They dragged her from her home, assaulted members of her family at gunpoint, and forced them into the backyard, where they could hear her screams. Half an hour later, the soldiers returned with an arrest memo. By daybreak, she was

dead

.

The Assam Rifles claimed that she had been shot ‘while trying to run away’. But there was no blood around her bullet-ridden corpse, which was recovered not by the army men who confessed to killing her, but villagers for whom her mutilated body had been left to find. The post-mortem report documented injuries consistent with torture, including bullet wounds to her vagina, while forensic examinations found human semen on her clothes.

Twenty-two years later, no one has been held accountable for Manorama’s abduction, torture, gang rape, and murder. Multiple official inquiries have been constituted by the courts, the state government, and even the Assam Rifles, but their reports have never been made public. Public outrage—from prolonged strikes and road blockades to the now-iconic protest by Manipuri women outside the Assam Rifles headquarters and even acts of self-immolation—failed to produce a single conviction.

Why? Because Section 6 of the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act, 1958

provides

that:

“No prosecution, suit or other legal proceeding shall be instituted, except with the previous sanction of the Central Government, against

any person

in respect of

anything done

or purported to be done in exercise of the powers conferred by this Act.”

“There should be some fiction, some stories, some lies,” psephologist and

political activist

Yogendra Yadav

remarked

at a press conference on 7 July 2026, referring to the fabricated evidence and procedural violations in the UP Police’s investigation into the Noida workers’ protests. “We should preserve at least some illusions,” he said.

“One of them is the rule of law.”

II

There is another sense in which 11 July was significant. Marked by protests

across the country

, beginning at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi and extending to Kolkata, Hyderabad, Pune, Vizag and elsewhere, the date marked three months since the Noida incarcerations began on 11 April 2026.

In a six-minute video recorded at around 7 p.m. that day inside Botanical Garden Metro Station, two women are seen trying to shield a man from overzealous uniformed officials and an even more overzealous group of men in plain clothes. In broad daylight, the men attempt to take him away against his will while he and the women repeatedly ask who they are, what they want, and why they are doing this. They receive no response. The man is Rupesh Roy, one of the accused in the present case; the unidentified men—at least those in uniform—are members of the UP Police SWAT team, according to friends and family of the accused.

The arrest is striking not only because it took place inside a busy Metro station, with CRPF personnel standing nearby, but because although every visible officer involved is male, by the end of this series of videos not only Roy but also the two women attempting to shield him, Manisha Chauhan and Akriti Choudhary, have been taken into custody. As per the BNSS, 2023 (

section 46

,

subsection 5

), arresting women after sunset (or …