National President of the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) AA Rahim has moved the Supreme Court with a plea alleging that the police committed excesses against its members inside compartmentalised vehicles after detaining them during a protest demanding the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar.
Rahim, who is a member of the Rajya Sabha and Communist Party of India (Marxist), alleged that DYFI office bearers, its central committee members and other activists were illegally detained from Connaught Place and bundled into a bus on Sunday afternoon.
The bus was driven to a closed and heavily guarded space in front of the Daryaganj Restaurant and the detainees were sorted according to gender and then forcibly shifted into a specialised police van divided into five separate cells, Rahim's plea alleges.
"This was not an act of stray excess, but planned and deliberately executed physical brutality. Inside the cells of the van, the detainees were beaten on the face, kicked on the backbone with boots and struck on the head. Several of the personnel wore no name badges. The detainees were then taken to Surajmal Stadium, which they reached at about 14:00 hrs. The vehicles functioned as unrecorded, mobile places of detention, wholly outside the safeguards of the Constitution and the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, 2023 (BNSS)," it adds.
The plea further states that neither any arrest memo was prepared nor grounds of arrest were communicated to the detainees. They were released in the evening after over seven hours of police custody without any food or primary needs, as per the plea.
It adds that police personnel in plain clothes remained present at Dr. Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital when the DYFI members went there for medico-legal examination. Rahim has said that the medico-legal certificates may not truly record the injuries.
The plea argues that the detentions were in violation of the law and also the order passed by the Supreme Court on Sunday in an urgent hearing on a petitions challenging the clampdown on protestors in Delhi.
Rahim has prayed for a declaration against the use of curtained compartmentalised vehicles as places of detention, disclosure of the record of the detention and preservation of the CCTV and GPS data.
He has also sought an independent inquiry into the incident and compensation for the victims. Rahim has also prayed for an order to identify all the personnel of Delhi Police, the Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) and any other force who detained and held the members of DYFI.