New Delhi- The UP Police on 22 June filed chargesheets in three of the 16 fragmented FIRs filed in the broader matter of the police action undertaken by it in Noida through the second and third week of April earlier this year, followed by a fourth on 3^rd June, allegedly due to violence and destruction of property carried out by protesters and agent provocateurs guiding a massive industrial strike wave across UP’s Gautam Buddha Nagar district between 9 and 13 April. These chargesheets were presented to the public on Tuesday, 7^th July, in a press conference organised by the Campaign for the Release of Workers and Activists of Noida (CaRWAN), and contain a concerning amount of discrepencies, ommissions and even blatant internal contradictions.

 Panelists Shuddhabrata Sengupta from RAQS Media Collective, psephologist Yogendra Yadav, tribal rights activist Himanshu Kumar, professor Nandita Narain, Supreme Court Advocates Kawalpreet Kaur and Zia Kabir Chaudhary and Keshaw Anand from CaRWAN chaired the conference. While Anand and Chaudhary focused on the facts and evidences presented—or lack thereof—in the chargesheets, the remaining activists highlighted larger concerns raised by the existence of a criminal proceeding in the larger Noida workers’ strike matter at all.

CaRWAN’s Anand, who is also the brother of Aditya Anand, one of the nearly two hundred unique named accused in the instant matter, opened the conference with a detailed analysis of the four chargesheets, namely those for FIRs 163, 164, and 165 of 2026 committed on 22^nd June and that of FIR 169 committed on 3^rd July, highlighting surprising and absurd fallacies in their contents, even regarding the most basic of facts.

“The same individuals—Akriti, Srishti, Rupesh, Manisha (who were, in fact, illegally arrested by the UP police on 11^th of April)—have different dates of arrest in the chargeheets and remandsheets of FIRs 163, 164, 165. Not only this, the chargesheets also give contradictory locations for the accused.” Videos of this arrest were livestreamed by Shrishti on 11 April at around 7 PM, whose phone was also then snatched by the police on camera.

Anand also showed how the police had made fake recoveries of different pieces of “evidence.”

Video evidence was also presented at the conference, exposing the narratives of the chargesheets to be utterly falsified and a blatant attempt at fabricating a case against the accused post facto.

Furthermore, Anand also pointed out that the chargesheets fail to provide any evidence incriminating any of the activists, and instead try to cover-up the police involvement in the violence. For instance, they maintain complete silence on the involvement of SI Beena of Sector 142 police station. Beena had sent videos of a burning car to the workers’ WhatsApp group she had infiltrated at 10:40 AM on 13 April 2026, but has faced no action despite evidence of her and another police-linked inividual infiltrating the groups and sending instigatory messages reaching the public domain after a sting operation by Jansatta two months ago.

“The police have only taken action against Anil Kumar,” Anand said about the other agent procateur, who had also infiltrated the group and sent provocative messages. “When asked about Beena, they have only said that she was ‘an undercover agent.’ But surely if she was an undercover agent, she would have gathered some evidence, followed some mission procedure. Where is her report? Where is the evidence gathered in her undercover operation? Why is there no mention of such an operation in the chargesheet?” he asked.

Moreover, the presence of supposed undercover agents and infiltrators within workers’ WhatsApp groups implies that the police had ongoing operations in place during and before the strikes themselves, talks of which in turn had already been in the public domain for weeks before April 9. Advocate Zia Kabir Chaudhary highlighted this, raising damning questions about the lack of police preparedness and underhanded crowd control response.

“The protest was going on for days. It was very well known and from weeks and months in advance; it was in public domain that the protest will be held. Thousands of workers were there on the street day after day after day. Police had sufficient notice. Why was their response so washed out?” Chaudhary asked.

Indeed, when compared to the police planning for the management of significantly smalled crowds, like the Turkman Gate demolitions in January which were filmed extensively—even tar gas was liberally used, and this is for an alleged crowd of fewer than 30 people—or the ongoing Cockroach Janta Party protest at Jantar Mantar, where over 30 independent phorographers were contracted by the police to record proceedings, to call the response in Noida washed out, if anything, is an understatement.

“Where was that graded response which the law talks about? There were no water cannons,” Chaudhary asked. “Where was that extensive videography mandated by police manuals and many judgements? Where is the recording of those police drones which were there at the protest? Why has that not come in this charge?”

Coming back to the other agent procateur, Kumar was arrested on 20 May 2026 and later released on bail on 3 June 2026 by a fast track court, but not before a recording of him admitting to be a driver of DCP Vijay Gupta went viral on social media. The police have denied this claim, and instead arrested law student Yogesh Meena on 26 May 2026, alleging that he had been in communication with Kumar and had asked him to send the provocative messages.

In the chargesheet for FIR 169, under which Kumar was arrested, evidence of this collusion is absent. The Call Details Record (CDR) of all other accused, including Meena are included, to demonstrate a singular phone call made by him to Kumar at 8:47 AM on 13 April 2026, before he sent the infamous provocative voice recording at 12:55PM the same day, saying “Modi aa raha hai, bypass ka udghatan karne. Kal pura road jam karna chahiye.” (“Modi is going to inaugurate the bypass tomorrow. We should jam the whole road.”)

Screenshots of the WhatsApp group presented at the conference revealed that Kumar had sent another suspicious message just a minute prior to Meena’s phone call, at 8:46 PM, a video apparently recorded from the inside of a police car, as per Meena. Though one phone call was far from sufficient to prove Meena’s guilt, it is noteworthy that exchanges of the group infact that could possibly exonerate him from even suspicion were omitted from the chargesheet by the UP police. Even more damning, is that Kumar’s own CDR is not even included in the chargesheet, while that of every other accused is.

“Why aren’t Anil Kumar’s CDR present in the chargesheet? Why aren’t his bank records,” Anand asked. “Because it would reveal who he was actually in contact with? Because it would make clear who he was really working for, right?”

A brief list of many more such inconsistencies and procedural violations by the UP police self exposed by them through their chargesheets was provided for press release at the conference, and has been attached. Supreme Court advocate Kawalpreet Kaur commented that these documents, which are the final report of over two months of police investigation, are full of “absurdities and lies.”

Tribal rights activist and Gandhian Himanshu Kumar called the entire investigation “laughable” and compared it to the infamous trial of Adivasi school teacher turned politician and tribal rights activist Soni Sori, whose arrest and custodial torture between 2011 and 2013 remain one of the most horrific cases of police violence against tribes people in Chattisgarh.

“The near-identical testimonies from obvious stock witnesses in this case remind me of the testimonies in Soni Sori’s chargesheets. ‘My name is so and so. I was on my way to defecate in the morning and I heard three naxals passing by. They said, “Today we will blow up this piece of infrastructure. Soni Sori is our friend.”’ Second testimony, ‘My name is so and so. I went to defecate in the woods. I heard four naxals passing by. They said, “Today we will blow up that piece of infrastructure. Soni Sori is our friend.”’ Testimony after testimony after testimony of people going to the latrine in the woods, overhearing this identical conversation,” Kumar said. “This is what the UP Police are doing. They are making a joke out of themselves.”

Sori was acquitted in 2013 by the Dantewada case in six out of eight cases registered against her due to lack of evidence.

Social activist and psephologist Yogendra Yadav, though disagreed. “Himanshuji said that [the UP police] will be mocked in the court. They have made us laugh and they are very incompetent people. I have a little disagreement here,” he said. “All this is happening on purpose.”

“This is not a case. They know very well what will happen after 10 years in this case. It makes no difference,” Yadav said. According to him, what is happening in Noida is a ‘symbolic’ act, meant to create an atmosphere of intimidation around dissent in the country, and more importantly, to signal to industrialists that their interests are protected, even and especially at the cost of their workforce: the ordinary populace.

“There are some cases which are a signaling device,” he said. “Some cases are taken up to make an example. I believe that this case will be counted among those cases in history. Who is the signal for? Well first, it is a signal is for the looters of this country. Those who run big factories and give 10,000 rupees to the workers. This is a signal for the investors. ‘There will be no labor problem. Do not worry.’ All the states have decided this. The case of Maruti Suzuki in Haryana was also a signaling device. 150 people were not given a year's bail so that no voice is raised.”

“The second signal is for the dissenters: Do not raise your voice. If you raise your voice, then something will happen that your descendants will remember. Who will be the judge after 10 years and what will be written in his 250-page judgment? What difference will it make? Those whose lives will be ruined, their family and descendants will not see your English dialogues. They will see that their father was in jail, that there was no food at home, that all this happened at home. These things will be remembered. This is the signal,” he concluded.

Nandita Narain—a prominent civil and democratic rights activist and a retired professor in Delhi University—declared that JFME (Joint Forum for Movement on Education), inclusive of all national level associations of school and university level teachers, stands in unwavering solidarity with the just demands of the working class and their struggles. Narain called out the multi-crore Nicobar Devlopment project that is set to tear through the Great Nicobar reserve, which is a UNESCO-recognised Bioshphere—where the construction of a port has been handed over to the Adani Group.

“It is a pro-capitalist government ruling over us which gives primacy to the naked profit-motives of the companies over a humane and dignified life to the workers,” she said. “The turn of events in Noida has shown that the Yogi government in UP has been acting like an agent of the capitalist class and unleashing the state police on the protesting workers.”

Shuddhabrata Sengupta, artist and member of the RAQS Media Collective announced a forthcoming open petition from India’s artists for the release of the workers and activists of Noida, highlighting the absurd targetting of 28-year-old artist Shrishti Gupta.

Though the bulk of Sengupta’s speech focused on the court’s villification of artists like Aakriti and Shrishti, who are a thespian and a visual artist respectively, he also highlighted a particularly strange portion of the chargesheets: a transcript of a phone call between a legal association instructor and their fiend, allegedly ‘within the ambit of suspicion.’

“What is this conversation? It is a friend calling another friend and asking, ‘how are you?’ The friend replies, ‘I am sad.’” The two go on to discuss this sadness. Why is it there? Where did it come from. What can one do to make it go away. The sad friend mentions that he goes out to play football occasionally, which helps. The other friend says that is good. So it goes, till they eventually wager that perhaps such is the state of the world. What can you do? “Sometimes I wake up in the morning and make pasta,” the friend says.

Sengupta went on to read from this excerpt of the voluminous chargesheet the investigator’s conclusion: “‘This proves,’” the chargesheet says, “‘that the people in question, are victims of sadness in this society.’”

Such is the nonsense that occupies these chargesheets, and this ‘case’. Sengupta said, before concluding the address, that he pities these investigators.

“I pity these junior policemen upon whom IPS officers thrust this awful work. To intrude upon people’s private lives, listen into such personal conversations, dig through their libraries, keep track of who is reading volume II of Marx’s Capital and who is reading up on Palestine’s history,” he said. “I feel sorry for them.”

“There were some key questions that we were hoping the chargesheets whould help answer regarding the whole debacle of [what went down] in Noida,” Supreme Court advocate Chaudhary Ali Zia Kabir said. Chaudhary raised eight broad questions about the police’s investigation of the matter beginning with the earliest arrests on 11 April 2026.

“First, if this was a conspiracy and not a legitimate protest, why did the government choose to increase the minimum wage?” he asked. Additionally, why was the police’s response of crowd control and preventive action so washed out? Why was there a delay going up to several days in the registry of FIRs? Why has there been continuous addition of names and sections in FIR? What was the logic and need to invoke a preventive detention law such as NSA when the people that you fear would create law and order problem are already in jail? Why was no arrest procedure followed by the police? Why was there such delay in action against the agent provocateur? And lastly, but certainly not the least—where on earth is the evidence of conspiracy?

Unfortunately, not one of them found answer.

On the questions regarding violations of police procedure, which were most buxom, the Supreme Court advocate added that the gross delays in registry of FIRs (which are manifest in the discrepancies between the charge and remand sheets of the accused), are a clear attempt to retroactively erase evidence of procedural abuse. “The Supreme Court has held in a number of cases that even a few hours’ delay in an FIR is fatal because this means that [the police] utilize that time to embellish the FIR and concoct a story.”

Chaudhary’s concerns point toward a curious pattern within larger investigation of the Noida pattern, where accusations, instead of preceding the identification of the accused, have followed them. In the case of each of Manisha, Satyam, Shrishti, Yogesh, Rupesh, Akriti, and many more of the hundreds charged, the accusations for which they were supposedly arrested have followed the event of their unwarranted arrests, nullifying the validity of their custodial restriction, and rendering them essentially state-sponsored kidnappings.

Yadav compared this to Emergency-era detentions, coloquially referred to in the north as dharpakkad—abductions.

“These are not arrests. In the olden days, there was a word called Dharpakad. They come in plain clothes. They kidnap someone from somewhere. After three days, they show their arrest. They bring someone from Tamil Nadu. They come to another state and show their arrest. Despite the Supreme Court's ruling, people are being arrested on the streets of Delhi. This is not a matter of law and arrest,” Yadav said. “This is another parallel empire which tells you that the law of this country is not what is written. You are reading the papers for no reason.”

Returning to the procedural violations, Chaudhary said that right up till two months after the first FIR was registered, “[the police] kept on adding names, kept on adding sections.” The invokation of NSA after the accused had already been (illegally) arrested and complete lack of arrest procedures were also highlighted.

“Policemen were not in uniform, they were not wearing their name plates, they were not wearing rank insignia, there were no arrest memos, there were no grounds of arrest,” Chaudhary said, to mention a few of the UP police’s colossal number of arrest procedure violations, making no mention of police brutality, custodial torture, detention of minors, arrests of women by male officers, and endless more. “The Supreme Court has said if there is no grounds of arrest, you cannot keep them in custody even for a second, and I quote, “even for a second.””

Violations of investigative procedure are violations of fundamental rights, and in previous cases of gross fabrication and evidence tampering by the police such as in the infamous ‘BK16’ case over an alleged Elgar Parishad conspiracy, accused have been granted bail expressly for the police’s failure to follow due procedure. In that case too, an annual gathering of over 2 lakh people was retroactively written off to be a conspiracy of a few intellectuals not even based in the state. Chaudhary highlighted the strangeness of this accusation.

“I ask you, how would you persuade 2,000 people,” as alleged by the police, though the true number of protesters on streets as consistently been reported by various news outlets to be much higher, “to get out on the streets to protest and not just protest, to do violently so?”

Not just violently, but so violently that 10-15 police vehicles were set on fire. “There has to be some preparation,” Chaudhary said. “Messages, telephone calls, emails, letters, money being transferred to account of workers on the ground, videos. Where is that evidence?”

“Where is that one message where one of them is asking any one person in the world that we need to be violent tomorrow, that we need to conduct violence? Where is that one video, one call recording, one email? It's not easy to get 2,000 or 1,500 or 500 people out on the streets. No matter how legitimate your cause may be, it's never easy. Anybody who has engaged with public and panelists here have, you cannot get 50 people out on the streets. You will have to prepare for months and months. Try inviting 500 people to your wedding, see if they make it. You will have to send them 10 reminders. You will have to personally telephone them, request them to come. Where are those phone calls? In the name of evidence, what do we have? A couple of statements from a couple of people which are all identical, almost verbatim repeated. And the content is saying that this person came to me, said, please come to protest tomorrow and do violence, I'll give you money. Can you imagine? Do you think you would be able to fetch a single person out on the street by promising him some money after he has conducted violence—and violence against the police? Set police vehicles on fire? How is it becoming easier and easier for a bunch of 20-25 years old and one old 60-year-old journalist based in Lucknow to get 2000 people on the street? Why is it becoming easier? Is there some problem with the governance? What's happening here?”

Finally, he raised the most crucial question of them all: Where is the crime?

“The charge sheet is the final report of investigation. It is the prosecution telling the court that these people deserve to be punished, deserve to be held guilty, because here's the evidence against them. It's a very serious document. And yet, a lot of inconsistencies have been pointed out. These are not typographical errors. Inconsistency with respect to the time of arrest, with respect to the place of arrest, and with respect to the presence of these people at the time when the violence was taking place—basic facts.”

“A comma or a full stop here and there [in a chargesheet] will decide whether you are to be released or whether you spend the next 10 years in jail because the offences are serious, [including] Attempt to murder of policemen. So it's a very serious document. It cannot be this inconsistent,” he said.

“Criminal cases are about individual responsibilities. They are not about vague allegations. They are not about, oh he attended some meeting. They are not about some collective responsibility, as the word conspiracy is being repeatedly used to confuse us about. The question is, where is the specific evidence against specific individuals? Forget evidence. The question is, what is that specific act? That crime that this person has committed or the one next to him has committed.”

Chaudhary said that throughout the police’s arguments in court and the four chargesheets filed, two months on after the first arrest, the answer to this question is still not clear.  

“Their statements are absolutely vague. ‘These people were conspiring to protest and engage in violence against the state.’ What do you mean by conspiring? What exactly did they do? How did they conspire? What violence were they trying to enact exactly? It's all vague, it's all up in the air. It's everything which the criminal law is not. Criminal law has to be very specific, very accurate, very to the point. This case violates every tenet of criminal jurisprudence ever.”

As of now, no date has been affixed for the four committed chargesheets to be reviewed in court, and the beginning for the trials in those four of sixteen cases has yet to be announced, suggestinging that the state itself may also be proceeding with the sixteen cases being a single legal matter, and that as alleged by the advocates for the accused, the fragmentation of the case may be maliciously motivated to complicate bail applications. A peition to combine the fragmented FIRs, which are illegal as per the landmark SC judgement in T. T. Antony vs State of Kerela, 2001, is currently pending at Allahabad High Court. A petition against the police’s butchered investigation and transferring of the case to an independent SIT (primarily due to the UP police’s involvement as agent provocateurs) is set to be heard on 21 July 2026 at the Supreme Court of India.

- Mouli Sharma is an author and journalist from New Delhi. Most recently, she has authored The two Turkmans, an investigation for Frontline’s latest special e-book, Turkman Gate: A tragedy relived. Her work has appeared in publications like Maktoob Media, GroundXero, The Observer Post, The Leaflet, Nivarana, The Polis Project, Article 14, Feminism in India, and been republished in SabrangIndia, NewsClick and Think Global Health.