The Allahabad High Court has ordered a compensation of ₹5 lakh to be paid to Akriti Chaudhary, a 25-year-old graduate of Delhi University. Chaudhary had spent approximately five months in judicial custody related to the Noida workers’ protest that occurred in April 2026. The court quashed her preventive detention under the National Security Act (NSA) on September 2. Furthermore, the court has mandated that the compensation amount be deducted from the salary of the Gautam Buddha Nagar district magistrate responsible for her detention.
The court also directed that its displeasure with the DM and the police be recorded in their service records. The court also criticised what it described as bureaucratic overreach, saying IAS and IPS officers must remember that their loyalty is to the Constitution and not the political executive. The court warned that officers who forget this risk reducing Uttar Pradesh to “an Orwellian Dystopia. The court also cautioned against restricting peaceful protests merely on the assumption that they could lead to a breach of peace.
In its detailed order made public on Monday, a bench of justices Atul Sreedharan and Achal Sachdev delivered a scathing indictment of the administration’s conduct, describing district magistrate Medha Roopam’s conduct as “worthy of derision” and saying she had sought to “set an example” out of a peaceful student activist to deter others from protesting. “They (civil servants) should realise that their loyalty is towards the Constitution and not the political executive, and the honesty and impartiality are towards the people whom they serve while bearing in mind at all times that they are the servants who serve the people, the masters in a democracy,” the court said. “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 said. “Preventing people from gathering in public spaces or agitating their rights on the grounds of assumed breach of peace,” it said, would amount to “throwing the baby out of the bath water”. Instead, the State should train its police force to manage large gatherings and use videography to ensure accountability when violence occurs, the court said.
