New Delhi: Around 4pm, a 30-year-old Supreme Court advocate learnt that her friend, an independent journalist, had been detained near Dilli Haat. A live location, furtively shared from his phone, led her to a wedding hall in Chhatarpur that is now a detention centre.“When we called the number listed on Google for the business, the manager picked up. He was standing right in front of us,” she said. She managed to enter the premises to contact her friend. Then she found several minors detained there.“I was talking to uniformed officers about the minors when a man in plainclothes came from the side and started poking his finger in my face and shouting,” she said.As lawyers across Delhi fanned out to police stations Saturday to secure the release of protesters, some were themselves pushed out, manhandled or detained.Supreme Court advocate Saimon Farooqui said he faced such an ordeal when he went from Chhatrasal Stadium to Mahendra Park police station after learning that detainees had been taken there.“At first, they weren’t letting us meet anyone inside. After a lot of insisting, the SHO let me in, not to interact with the detainees, but just to be shown around. When I asked him if they had been given anything to eat, he reluctantly said no,” Farooqui said.The situation escalated when lawyers waiting for the release of detainees were ushered out as DCP (northwest) Akansha Yadav arrived. Farooqui said they wanted to request that food for those in custody, but Yadav declined to meet them and left within minutes.The detainees, picked up from Minto Road at 8am, were released between 6pm and 8pm.Fidel Tom, a lawyer detained at Dilli Haat and taken to Sanjay Colony police station, said the police personnel wanted his phone. “When I refused (to give my phone), 10 policemen, including a plainclothes officer, started beating me up,” he said.One officer pressed down on his chest until the police wrested the phone from his grasp, Tom said. When his senior, advocate Subhash Chandran, learnt of his detention, other lawyers went to the police station, where they were first told that no one named Fidel Tom was there. They were later told he had been released, although he was inside, he said.The only medical assistance he got was a painkiller during his medico-legal examination. He was released at 2am.Senior advocate Shupantha Sinha, who has been coordinating the effort of sending lawyers to various police stations, said: “These policemen in remote areas are used to dealing with hardened criminals….. Now, faced with protesters who are from civil society, the legal fraternity or simply students, they aren’t differentiating between them and a commonplace criminal.”Senior advocate Shadan Farasat Sunday told the apex court that he was “brutalised along with other lawyers”. He added that there had been flagrant violations of directions of the court’s Oct 9 order.Delhi High Court Bar Association (DHCBA) has condemned the detentions. “Video footage that has surfaced depicts lawyers, including senior advocates, being physically dragged by the police,” a resolution, signed by DHCBA president and senior advocate N Hariharan and honorary secretary Vikram Singh Panwar, said. “Such high-handed and undignified treatment of members of the legal fraternity is wholly reprehensible.”“DHCBA expresses its strongest disapproval of the excessive and disproportionate use of force against the protesting lawyers, including women advocates,” it added.The bar association president also appeared in Supreme Court’s special Sunday hearing to highlight the problems being faced by the legal community in even reaching courts due to the restrictions imposed by police.
