The Allahabad High Court had quashed the NSA detention of a Delhi University student and directed that Rs 5 lakh compensation be recovered from the salaries of the officers responsible, from the District Magistrate down to the Station House Officer. The District Magistrate has now challenged that direction before the Supreme Court. The petition is yet to be listed and nothing has been decided.
New Delhi: Gautam Buddh Nagar District Magistrate Medha Roopam has moved the Supreme Court challenging the Allahabad High Court order which directed that Rs 5 lakh awarded as compensation to Delhi University student Akriti Chaudhary be recovered from the salary of the officers responsible for her detention under the National Security Act, 1980 [Medha Roopam v. Akriti Chaudhary].
The order under challenge was passed on September 2, 2026 by a Division Bench of Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Achal Sachdev, which allowed Chaudhary’s habeas corpus petition, quashed the detention order and the grounds of detention, and recorded sharply critical findings about the manner in which the District Magistrate had exercised the power. The petition before the Supreme Court has not yet been listed, and no order has been passed on it.
The background
The case arises from a labour agitation in Gautam Buddh Nagar in April 2026, in which workers protested over wages of between Rs 10,000 and Rs 15,000 a month, twelve-hour shifts and the absence of increases over several years. According to the record before the High Court, thousands of workers came onto the streets near an industrial establishment and there were allegations of vandalism, arson and the burning of vehicles, including police vehicles, from April 13.
Chaudhary, who the High Court recorded is about 24 years old, holds a history degree from Daulat Ram College and a master’s in history from Delhi University, and is a first-year law student at the Faculty of Law, Delhi University. The State admitted before the Court that she had no previous criminal antecedents. She was named in Case Crime No. 163 of 2026 and was subsequently detained under the NSA. The prosecution case was that she was the agent provocateur behind the violence, having conspired with associates in early April to foment it.
Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves, appearing for Chaudhary, argued that the proceedings were an attempt to stifle freedom of speech and expression, and that even taking the allegations at their highest there were no grounds for invoking the NSA.
What the High Court found on the arrest
The central factual difficulty the Court identified was one of sequence. The State’s own case was that Chaudhary was taken into custody on April 12 and that the violence began on April 13. The Court held that a person already in custody could not be held responsible for what followed, and went further, finding on the basis of unanswered WhatsApp messages sent to her from 5.56 pm on April 11 that she had in fact been in custody from the evening of April 11, as she had contended.
The State had relied on a notice under Section 130 of the BNSS, requiring a bond for good behaviour, said to have been issued before she was taken into custody. Justice Achal Sachdev pointed out that the notice carried a printed General Diary entry number that had itself been generated only after the arrest. Adopting that observation, Justice Sreedharan held:
“Mentioning the G.D. number in the notice under Section 130 of the BNSS reveals that the Petitioner was already arrested and the procedure of giving a notice under Section 130 of the BNSS was ex post facto the arrest and nothing more than a sham.”
The Court also recorded that it had repeatedly asked the State to identify any message or video clip showing incitement to rioting or arson, and that counsel had been unable to point to a single one. The videos relied upon, it said, showed people gathered near lamp posts, neither armed nor agitated.
The findings on the District Magistrate
On the scope of the power itself, the Bench held that preventive detention is an exception and cannot be used to keep in custody a person who might otherwise secure bail:
“Any detention under the NSA is an exception. It is not a substitute to ensure that a person who may receive bail on account of merits of his case, is still detained in custody under a concocted reasoning by the State.”
It described the grounds of detention as repetitive, speculative and opinion-based, unsupported by any material, and held that such a power cannot be exercised on surmises, biases, conjectures and opinions.
Turning to the bureaucracy more broadly, the Court invoked the line attributed to Rudyard Kipling about power without responsibility, observed that the loyalty of officers is owed to the Constitution rather than to the political executive, and warned that if errant officers were not checked it would not be long before they reduced Uttar Pradesh to an Orwellian dystopia. On the District Magistrate specifically, the Bench held:
“The conduct of the District Magistrate Gautam Buddha Nagar who passed the impugned order, is worthy of derision.”
The Court found that the circumstances revealed that the District Magistrate had desired to make an example of Chaudhary in order to deter others from exercising the right to freedom of speech in support of the labourers, and that she was guilty of violating her oath of allegiance. These are the findings now under challenge, and the grounds on which the District Magistrate disputes them are not yet in the public domain.
How the figure of Rs 5 lakh was arrived at
A detail largely absent from the wider coverage is that Chaudhary had sought Rs 50 lakh, and that the Court granted a tenth of it after accepting a submission made by the State. Counsel for the State argued that the only period of detention attributable to the NSA order was a single day, because Chaudhary was arrested in Case Crime No. 163 of 2026, has remained in judicial custody since, and would continue in custody until she secured bail. The Bench expressly recorded that it found force in that submission and that the NSA detention had merged with her judicial custody, which is why the full amount claimed was not awarded.
It is also worth being precise about who was directed to pay, because the direction is frequently described as one against the District Magistrate alone. The Court directed recovery from her salary and, alongside it, from all other officers who may have been responsible, in its words “right down to the SHO of the Police Station, who had prepared the initial report warranting the detention”. It further directed that its displeasure be recorded in the service records of the District Magistrate and of the police officers who prepared the dossier.
Where the matter stands
Two separate challenges are now in motion. On September 9, Solicitor General Tushar Mehta informed the Supreme Court that an appeal would be filed against the High Court’s decision quashing the detention order. The present petition is a distinct one, filed by the District Magistrate in her own name and directed at the monetary and service-record consequences visited upon her personally.
It should also be borne in mind that the quashing of the NSA detention is not an acquittal. The High Court itself recorded that a chargesheet has been filed against Chaudhary in Case Crime No. 163 of 2026, that cognizance has been taken, that her bail application has been rejected, and that she would remain in custody as an undertrial until she secured bail in the cases against her. Those allegations remain untested and are yet to be decided by the trial court. The NSA was also invoked against activist and journalist Satyam Verma on May 13.
Why it matters
The question the Supreme Court will confront is not whether the detention was lawful, which is the subject of the State’s separate appeal, but whether a High Court exercising habeas corpus jurisdiction may fix personal financial liability on a named serving officer and direct that an adverse entry follow into her service record. Compensation in public law for violation of Article 21 is well established since Rudul Sah and Nilabati Behera, but it is ordinarily awarded against the State, which retains the option of proceeding against individual officers through departmental channels. A direction that bypasses that route and reaches straight for an officer’s salary is a considerably sharper instrument, and it is that step, rather than the finding of illegality, which is being tested.
There is precedent pointing in both directions. The Supreme Court has previously stayed an Allahabad High Court order awarding compensation for alleged illegal detention by Uttar Pradesh police, and courts have on other occasions upheld recovery from the officers at fault. What the Court makes of a direction framed as broadly as this one, extending to every officer responsible down to the Station House Officer without individually identifying them or hearing them, may prove to be the point on which the matter turns.
The wider context is the use of preventive detention in cases arising from protest. The Allahabad High Court has itself remarked in recent months on the volume of preventive detention orders in parts of Uttar Pradesh, and the frequency with which such orders reach the constitutional courts has become a subject of judicial comment in its own right. How the Supreme Court approaches the accountability end of that question, as distinct from the legality end, is what gives this petition its significance.
Case Title: Medha Roopam v. Akriti Chaudhary (Supreme Court, yet to be listed)
Order Under Challenge: Akriti Chaudhary v. Union of India and 4 Others [Habeas Corpus Writ Petition No. 960 of 2026], 2026 LiveLaw (AB) 645
Bench: Justice Atul Sreedharan and Justice Achal Sachdev, High Court of Judicature at Allahabad
Date of High Court Order: September 2, 2026
Appearances before the High Court: Senior Advocate Colin Gonsalves with Advocates Charlie Prakash, Manik Gupta and Rajvendra Singh for the petitioner. Advocate Balram Govind Tripathi holding brief of Advocate Kuldeep Kumar for the Union of India. Additional Government Advocate Nitesh Kumar Srivastava for the State.
