The Polis Project

Tortured, Acquitted After Death: Story Of A Muslim Prisoner In 2025, the Bombay High Court delivered justice to a dead man. Kamaal Ahmed Ansari, a prisoner for two decades, had already perished behind bars 4 years ago.

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On April 19, 2021, at around 1 am, Kamaal passed away. He was only 30 years old at the time of his arrest. His acquittal came four years too late; he had already died in prison, another casualty of a system that treats Muslim identity as guilt by association.

Even as the ATS built its case against Kamaal, documents and witnesses told another story, one that placed Kamaal far from Mumbai on the day of the blasts. Kamaal was in Nepal on July 11, 2006, as per records.

Kamaal faced severe torture in prison, said Dr Abdul Wahid Shaikh who was also behind bars for nine years. “The trial court had already decided whom to believe. The judges bent over backwards to validate the police’s ‘investigation’, while the voices of the accused were muffled.”

Kamaal’s Muslim identity made him a target for relentless state scrutiny. Kamaal faced systematic harassment across multiple cases from 2002–05, with the police manufacturing charges, demanding bribes, and using intimidation tactics that established him as a permanent target regardless of evidence.

Media investigations pointed out that Kamaal may have been an informer for the Intelligence Bureau, which is why his phone was under ATS surveillance after the 7/11 bombings. A retired ATS officer told us that Kamaal was an informer. He was sent to infiltrate the Lashkar-e-Taiba, but later framed.

Investigations into Kamaal’s case revealed that a religious text message became proof of extremism, spiralling into a case built on suspicion, surveillance, and selective evidence. Torture-extracted confessions were used as evidence, and alibi documents disappeared from trial proceedings.

On July 21, 2025, the Bombay High Court delivered justice to a dead man. Kamaal Ahmed Ansari had already perished behind bars, his spirit crushed by nearly two decades of juridical indifference. The court quashed earlier convictions of all 12 accused in the 2006 Mumbai local train bombings.

The Delhi Metro Is Just A Prestige Project The Delhi Metro is yet another large-scale project termed as “development” but which seldom aids most of the population.

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The students outside Nirman Bhawan were challenging a vision of the city that treats public transport as a luxury. Whether policymakers will listen remains an open question, but the voices from the pavement grow louder each day.

Metro accessibility issues are compounded for persons with disabilities. Design critic Henri Fanthome observed that the Metro’s accessibility is often just cosmetic. He encountered a blind passenger being led into a train whose path from the street was obstructed by parked cars and broken pavement.

Far more men than women ride the trains. Only about 20% of Delhi Metro trips are taken by women. The only ones flooding the trains are those who can afford the higher fare. For nearly a third of Delhi riders, Metro travel eats up nearly 20% of household income.

The Metro largely caters to middle-class men in Delhi—office-goers heading to Connaught Place or Gurgaon. By contrast, an auto-rickshaw puller near Old Delhi can never afford the ₹60-100 daily fare. The Metro’s famed efficiency is moot if you can’t even reach the station cheaply.

The Delhi Metro was clearly never intended to be a public transport system for all. It was engineered as a prestige project financed by foreign debt and justified through cost-recovery logic. Its benefits are experienced only by a handful of the upper-middle class.

Students pay just ₹75 for five months of unlimited bus travel in the city, yet a single metro ride costs over ₹40, a price few poor or migrant workers can afford. The Metro was built on loans and tax breaks—a capital-intensive juggernaut largely inaccessible to the everyday commuter.

On a November morning last year, two dozen Delhi University students stood outside Nirman Bhawan, demanding a concessional pass for the Delhi Metro. By noon, police had detained more than thirty of them. How did Delhi build a metro that remains unaffordable for the workers who keep the city running?

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Today, food remains at the heart of violent caste-based discrimination all over India.
The increasing presence of all kinds of meat and speaking of Dalit discourses in the context of taste for mass audiences is like living the dream of all those who fought for dignity and equal opportunity.

Nandhan revolves around a loyal Dalit sidekick, Koozhpaanai, and his dominant caste employer, Koppulingam. The most piercing communicative expression happens through food. Koppulingam’s violent nature is exhibited when he makes Koozhpaanai dine with his kin men, whom he wants to disgrace.

The aesthetic of beef and pork as food of the good characters was absent because Dalits were absent as creators in Tamil cinema, until Pa. Ranjith, Mari Selvaraj, Vetrimaran brought stories of how they live, and what they eat.

Blue Star revolves around the aspirations of a bunch of Dalit youth to play a match. The film uses food as a symbol to inform the distance between the aspirations of young players and the ones whose fight is to play from a ‘higher’ caste position.

A section of Tamil cinema is undoing the culinary worldviews of the past. Popular Tamil films like Blue Star and Nandhan have stretched the boundaries of what is showable food on screen. Close-up visuals of pork and beef are a big deal because meat eating is directly linked to caste.

TOMORROW — Varsha Bharath, director of ‘Bad Girl’, joins host Suchitra Vijayan and guest host Aditya Shrikrishna. She brings along five objects that have shaped her life and work.

WHEN: Tomorrow, September 29
TIME: 10 AM ET / 7:30 PM IST
WHERE: YouTube

Register: www.eventbrite.com/e/5-objects-...

Remembering The Hazaribagh Jailbreak: A Witness Marks 54 Years - The Polis Project On the 54th commemoration of the 1971 jailbreak attempt, in which16 political prisoners were gunned down, the only living witness narrates the incident.

Read 'Remembering the Hazaribagh Jailbreak: A Witness Marks 54 Years' by Prashant Rahi: thepolisproject.com/read/prison-...

Mukhopadhyay’s verses, read at the commemoration, carried an ardor that urged courage in the face of overwhelming adversity. His poem, ‘Love’:

When in love
Do not become the moon
If you can
Come forth as the sun
I’ll take along its heat
And light up the darkened forests.

“It was the sheer poetry of Murari-da that steered the daring escape, shunning all ‘legalist’ claptrap. If the state’s very edifice was built upon carcerality, what justice could be expected from pleading at its altar?” — Tapan Chatterjee

Before any close combat could unfold, armed guards had cocked their rifles—and opened fire with abandon. Mukhopadhyay, leading from the front, was among the first to be hit. “Bijon-da caught Murari-da before both fell to the ground. But the end was yet to come.” 16 people died.

The action was led by 26-year-old Murari Mukhopadhyay. “We detonated dynamite sticks in the outer wall, but alarmingly, none went off,” Chatterjee said. The prisoners had stark choices: retreat to their cells, or attempt to escape in full view of the guards. Almost instantly, they chose the latter.

Chatterjee recounted the often-overlooked details of the blood-soaked Hazaribagh jailbreak.
A section of the warders remained discreetly supportive of the political prisoners. This, he felt, was “due to the warders’ own social oppression. This generated amongst them a natural affinity towards us.”

Recent reports from eastern and central India have described mounting “encounter” killings of Maoists. Operation Kagaar, a militarized campaign of ground and air assaults against Maoist rebels, has coincided with transfers of mineral-rich Adivasi lands to corporations.