Prayagraj, Nov 8: The Allahabad High Court has delivered a stinging rebuke to the Uttar Pradesh Police, observing that the situation relating to civil liberties in the state is "shameful, to say the least" and that the police appear to have "little regard for the fundamental rights and civil liberties of citizens".
The observations came as the court allowed a habeas corpus petition and ordered the immediate release of a man who, it found, had been kept in custody for two days before his arrest was formally recorded.
A bench of Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Achal Sachdev made the observations while hearing the petition of Ausad Ahmad, a resident of Bijnor, who claimed that he was taken into custody by the Bijnor police on September 5, 2026, but that his formal arrest was shown only on September 7, 2026.
The court directed that the petitioner be set at liberty forthwith, if he is not wanted in any other case, and directed the state to pay 20,000 rupees as costs to him within seven days.
The case turned on a question that has troubled the court in several recent matters: what happens to the CCTV footage from police stations when a court asks to see it. In this case, the state relied on a general diary entry dated September 5, 2026, which stated that a thunderstorm had occurred and that water had trickled down the LAN cable into the CCTV system, causing it to malfunction and fail. The court was not persuaded.
It said it would be sufficient to accept the petitioner's contention that he had been unlawfully detained and that the CCTV footage was "deliberately withheld to obfuscate the truth maliciously".
The bench held that the police could not use the excuse of CCTV malfunctioning in a case of alleged unlawful detention. The observation goes to the heart of why cameras were ordered into police stations in the first place: to create an independent record of what happens to a person between being picked up and being produced before a magistrate, the period in which the risk of abuse is greatest.
When that record is missing, the court said in effect, the benefit of the doubt cannot go to the police.
The judgment, dated November 3, also took note of the role of the station house officer of Nangal, Anoo Kumari, observing that she had deliberately not provided the CCTV footage relevant to deciding the case. The finding against an individual officer, rather than a general observation about the system, is significant, because it attaches personal responsibility for the failure to produce evidence that the court had called for.
The case is recorded as Petitioner 'X' and another versus the State of Uttar Pradesh and four others, and the order has been reported in Live Law as 2026 LiveLaw (AB) 930. The court's directions were clear and immediate: release the petitioner at once unless he is wanted in another case, and pay him 20,000 rupees in costs within a week.
The sum is modest, but the court has used costs in such cases as a marker that the state, not the citizen, must bear the consequence when liberty is taken without lawful authority.
The observations are the latest in a series of sharp remarks by the same bench about policing in Uttar Pradesh.
On October 7, hearing the habeas corpus petition of a man named Deepak, the bench told the Assistant Commissioner of Police of Gautam Buddha Nagar and a station house officer that they should be ashamed of having issued a notice to an accused under Section 130 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita when the accused was already in police custody and was subsequently shown as arrested only after the registration of a first information report.
On September 8, in the case of Akriti Chaudhary, a Delhi University law student against whom the National Security Act had been invoked over her role in a workers' protest in Noida, the same bench revoked the NSA and imposed a fine of five lakh rupees to be recovered from the salary of the District Magistrate of Gautam Buddha Nagar, holding her guilty of a lack of application of mind and of violating her oath of office.
The Supreme Court, too, has criticised the Uttar Pradesh police in recent weeks. On October 1, a bench of Justice Sanjay Kumar and Justice Sanjeev Sachdeva castigated the police in a case in which a first information report had been registered against a motorcycle rider who was caught on the spot, yet the FIR was registered in the name of an unknown person.
The court commented that the police seemed to have an agenda and asked how people would trust the police if they proceeded in that manner. On September 29, a bench of Justice Dipankar Datta and Justice Sheel Nagu quashed the National Security Act used to keep businessman Mulla Afroz incarcerated after he had obtained bail from the High Court in six FIRs relating to the Sambhal violence of November 2024.
The pattern of judicial criticism has a longer background. In December 2020, the Supreme Court, in the case of Paramvir Singh Saini, directed that CCTV cameras be installed in all police stations across the country, with night-vision capability and audio recording, and that the footage be preserved for a minimum period.
The direction was meant to make police stations accountable and to give courts a reliable record in exactly the kind of case that came before the Allahabad High Court last week. The repeated invocation of malfunctioning cameras in Uttar Pradesh suggests that the direction is not being followed in spirit, whatever the position on paper.
Habeas corpus, the remedy the petitioner invoked, is one of the oldest protections of personal liberty in the common law tradition, and it is guaranteed under Article 32 and Article 226 of the Indian Constitution. It requires the state to produce a person before the court and to justify the detention. When the state cannot show a lawful basis for holding someone, the court orders release.
In this case, the gap between the date of custody and the date of formal arrest was itself the core of the complaint: a person picked up on September 5 and shown as arrested only on September 7 has spent two days in custody without the legal safeguards that an arrest triggers, including production before a magistrate within 24 hours.
The court's language matters because it speaks to a wider concern about how power is exercised in the state. "Shameful, to say the least" is unusually strong language for a judicial order, and the finding that footage was withheld "maliciously" goes beyond a finding of negligence.
The bench was saying, in plain terms, that it did not believe the explanation offered to it, and that it regarded the missing footage as a deliberate attempt to hide the truth about an unlawful detention.
For the Uttar Pradesh Police, the judgment is both a rebuke and a warning. The court's direction that the CCTV excuse is not available in unlawful detention cases means that officers who fail to produce footage in future cases may find the court drawing adverse conclusions against them, as it did here. The observation about the station house officer's conduct may also lead to departmental consequences, though no such action has been announced.
For the petitioner, the order means freedom and a small measure of compensation. For the wider public, the case is a reminder that the courts remain willing to intervene when the police are accused of overstepping the law, and that the right to liberty, guaranteed by Article 21 of the Constitution, is not an abstraction but a protection that can be enforced in a courtroom in Prayagraj on behalf of a man from Bijnor.
(Reporting based on Live Law, The Tribune and PTI.)