Six years after communal riots swept through North East Delhi leaving 53 people dead, five separate pleas seeking that an FIR be registered against senior BJP leader and Delhi minister Kapil Mishra remain stuck in courts.
The pleas, filed by citizens and activists, have made their way across various district courts, the High Court and even the Supreme Court, without crossing the threshold of a formal police investigation. On March 13, one of the five pleas, filed by a resident of the riot-affected area, in December 2020, was rejected by a Delhi court.
All the pleas deal with speeches made by Mishra over February 23 and 24, 2020, in North East Delhi’s Maujpur area, including allegedly inflammatory remarks like “shoot the traitors”, and giving an “ultimatum” to the Delhi Police to remove from the streets those protesting against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act at the time.
The Aam Aadmi Party was in power in Delhi then.
The complainants approached the judiciary after police allegedly refused to register the FIRs against Mishra. In February 2025, the BJP came to power and Mishra became the Law and Justice Minister, among his other portfolios.
Mohammad Ilyas’s plea
A resident of a riot-affected area, Ilyas accused Mishra and his associates of vandalising carts belonging to Muslims and Dalits in Kardampuri, even as police officials watched.
The plea was heard by the Karkardooma court for over three years before it returned the application to him, in February 2024, holding that since Mishra was a former MLA, only a special court constituted for trial of cases against MPs/MLA court could hear the complaint.
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Ilyas then filed his complaint before a Special MP/MLA court in Rouse Avenue.
On April 1, 2025, Additional Chief Judicial Magistrate (ACJM) Vaibhav Chaurasia of the Rouse Avenue Court ordered “further investigation” into Ilyas’s allegations against Mishra, rejecting the police theory that Mishra had no role. The BJP leader’s own interrogation placed him at the scene with 50 to 60 associates, the ACJM said.
On November 10, 2025, however, Special Judge Dig Vinay Singh set aside the ACJM’s order, ruling that it suffered from “a serious jurisdictional error” and “jurisdictional overreach”.
The Special Judge also noted that the Delhi Police Special Cell was already investigating a larger riot conspiracy case, in which 18 activists and locals were accused, and seven, including Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, were imprisoned.
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Singh ruled that the ACJM “lacked jurisdiction to entertain the complaint, as the matter is already under trial before a higher designated court”, and said Chaurasia’s criticism of the prosecution’s narrative went “beyond the primary purpose” of a magistrate’s power, as a magistrate cannot extensively scrutinise and dismiss the findings of an ongoing, complex investigation.
It was on the basis of this November order that ACJM Ashwani Panwar on March 13 formally dismissed Ilyas’s demand for an FIR. The magistrate said the Special Judge’s findings were “binding on this court and have attained finality”, making the registration of an FIR “legally impermissible at this stage”.
Panwar added that Ilyas’s application will be “treated as [a] complaint and the complainant is at liberty to lead evidence in support of his allegations” under provisions that allow a magistrate to initiate legal proceedings without an FIR, on the disclosure of a criminal offence having been committed.
Ilyas’s lawyer, Advocate Mahmood Pracha, told The Indian Express that they will be appealing against the order before a Sessions Court.
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Activist Harsh Mander’s plea
His was the first plea against BJP leaders relating to the riots, and was filed on February 26, 2020, in the Delhi High Court seeking action against Mishra, Anurag Thakur, Parvesh Verma and Abhay Verma.
A Bench headed by Justice S Muralidhar played videos of Mishra’s speeches in court, noting that they ex facie (on the face of it) appeared to constitute the crime of hate speech. The Bench urged police to seriously consider the consequences of delaying FIRs.
That same night, Justice Muralidhar got transferred to the Punjab and Haryana High Court.
In July 2020, a fact-finding committee constituted by the Delhi Minorities Commission raised questions over Mishra’s role, saying the riots were sparked by inflammatory remarks by him and other BJP leaders.
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Around the same time, the Delhi Police filed an affidavit in the High Court saying no evidence had surfaced linking Mishra to the riots. Mander subsequently withdrew his plea, to approach a lower court in 2021, hoping for relief.
Five years later, Mander’s plea before the Patiala House Court remains at the arguments stage, after three changes of judge.
Jamia Millia Islamia students’ plea
The third petition against Mishra was filed by the university’s students in 2020, seeking an FIR for hate speech, alleging that the BJP leader’s inflammatory social media posts and speeches had led to the riots.
The plea remains pending in the High Court, despite a December 2021 Supreme Court order requesting it to dispose of the matter “preferably within a period of three months”.
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This plea has been tagged with 14 other pleas relating to violence during the anti-CAA protest in Delhi and the Delhi riots.
With their pleas stuck, other complainants moved magistrate’s courts under Section 156(3) of the Code of Criminal Procedure, which empowers a magistrate to direct police to register an FIR and investigate a cognizable offence – a serious crime for which police are bound to register a case and can make an arrest without a warrant.
Progress in these lower courts has been sluggish.
Jami Rizvi’s plea
The plea by the North East Delhi resident is pending in a Shahdara court since March 2020, having seen three changes of judge.
Rizvi alleges that Mishra incited communal violence by delivering inflammatory speeches and brandishing a firearm while directing a mob to assault anti-CAA protesters.
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Muhamad Waseem’s plea
The fifth complaint was filed by Waseem, also a North-East Delhi resident, in November 2020.
He alleges that Mishra incited a violent crowd by making inflammatory slogans over a police-provided loudspeaker, and accuses him of brandishing a revolver and firing several bullets at demonstrators.
Waseem’s plea is stuck in a jurisdictional loop between a regular magistrate in Shahdara and a Special MP/MLA Court. While a magistrate directed Waseem to approach a Special MP/MLA Court in January 2025, a Sessions Judge stayed this order two weeks later.
A separate legal track
This involves an FIR registered by police under Section 125 of the Representation of the People Act, covering promotion of enmity between classes in connection with an election.
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The FIR was registered based on a complaint by a Returning Officer regarding Mishra’s tweets during the 2020 Delhi Assembly elections, which preceded the riots.
In June 2024, a magistrate took cognizance of the chargesheet in this case and summoned Mishra. The BJP leader challenged this, but on March 7, 2025, Special Judge Jitendra Singh dismissed his revision petition. The judge observed that Mishra’s statements appeared to be “a brazen attempt to promote enmity on the grounds of religion by way of indirectly referring to a ‘country’ [Pakistan], which unfortunately in common parlance is often used to denote the members of a particular religion”.
Mishra then approached the Delhi High Court, arguing that the digital evidence provided by X (formerly Twitter) regarding his account was in a “coded language” and incomprehensible. On August 28, 2025, the High Court stayed the framing of charges, requesting the trial court to defer hearings until the prosecution could provide interpreted documents to the petitioner.
