Syed Abdul Karim was discharged on March 5 by a Delhi court in all four cases against him by the Delhi Police’s Special Cell, producing much bafflement among India’s security establishment and the public at large.

Wanted for over 20 years, Syed Abdul Karim, alias Abdul Karim Tunda, had been proclaimed as the mastermind of a number of terror attacks. It was said after his arrest from near the Nepal border in 2013 that Tunda, along with some others, had laid the foundations of the jihadi network we see today. In the mid-1980s, according to this narrative, Tunda and others formed an armed group to defend Muslims where riots had broken out in the build-up to the Ram Janmabhoomi movement. Some years later, after the Babri Masjid demolition, the group allegedly carried out a series of attacks.

Writing for Firstpost in April 2013, senior journalist Praveen Swami declared that Tunda’s arrest was a “big catch” since the Indian establishment could finally “speak to someone who can tell the story from beginning to end”.

How then did Tunda get discharged on March 5?

Mind you, he was not acquitted after the completion of the trial, as is usually the case – he was discharged. This means that there was not even enough material to conduct a trial. The 74-year-old Tunda has now been transferred to Dasna jail in Ghaziabad, where he awaits more than a dozen trials across the country.

Entrenched prejudices

Forced to file an application in court at some point about the total number of cases against Tunda, his advocate MS Khan found that there were 33 such cases across India, including 22 in Delhi. Turned out, Delhi Police had named him in every conceivable terror case in the city. Out of the 22 cases, the Special Cell filed a charge-sheet in four – all relating to bombings in the 1990s, such as the ones in Sadar Bazar and Karol Bagh – and the Delhi court discharged Tunda even in these.

Following the March 5 verdict, a Twitter spat broke out between Praveen Swami and Mahtab Alam, a human rights activist.

.Now that #Tunda has been acquitted by court, what does @praveenswami hav to say about 'big catch' ? Cc @firstpost pic.twitter.com/R2qOZtWy63 — Mahtab Alam (@MahtabNama) March 6, 2016

I think he’s a terrorist who got off for the same reasons three out of four accused by women of rape get off https://t.co/sBDqS1Bc0u — Praveen Swami (@praveenswami) March 6, 2016

To claim that Tunda’s acquittal is similar to the acquittal of three of four rape accused is missing the point altogether. In many ways, it’s the opposite.

It is entrenched patriarchy that often enables a rape accused to go scot-free. From the level of investigation (rape victims’ reticence to take matters public, police’s refusal to file first information reports, shoddy and prejudiced probes) to trial (where the guilt is attributed to the victim) and judgements (where they get away), institutionalised prejudices play a big role in deciding cases of rape offences.

In terror prosecutions too, there are prejudices at play, albeit different from what Swami probably thinks. Over the past two decades, the judiciary has followed what is sometimes referred to as “National Security Maximalism” – where all due procedures, constitutional safeguards and adjudicating principles have been diluted in the fight against terror.

Over the past 20 years, new policing bodies, with extensive powers of extrajudicial violence, have been set up under laws that overturn the fundamental principles of evidence-making and trial. Allowing a confession to a police officer to be admissible in court, lowering the threshold of evidence required to convict an accused, extending custody of an accused, keeping him in prison for the duration of the trial, all these are manifestations of the reversal of the fundamental principles.

It is in this context that the discharge of Tunda needs to be considered. The discharge does not present, to borrow Manisha Sethi’s words, the “image of a bumbling policeman, reminiscent almost of Jacques Clouseau, tripping over reams and strings of evidences, in an impossible attempt to build a watertight case against the villains”. Nor does it present the picture of the state prosecuting a few in the war on terror – all in good faith.

What the four cases represent is the way the Delhi Police Special Cell prosecutes terror offences. They have the Cell's signature all over them.

Process as punishment

Formed in 1986, in the wake of secessionist assertions in Punjab, the Delhi Police Special Cell has developed a reputation for fabricating cases against innocent citizens. On many occasions, it has been castigated severely, with a court even pointing out that “there cannot be any more serious or grave crime than a police officer framing an innocent citizen in a false criminal case”.

The Jamia Teachers Solidarity Association, a civil rights group which has followed terror prosecutions by the Special cell for almost 10 years, has highlighted 24 cases where the Special Cell fabricated evidence against innocent citizens, making them spend an average of six years in prison before acquittal.

Tunda’s guilt is yet to be established, and it is possible that he may spend the rest of his life as an undertrial. But what the cases in Delhi show is that the Special Cell named him in as many cases as it could, filed a few chargesheets which did not even have the basic evidence to run a trial, and kept him in prison as an undertrial for more than three years. Going by the records, it does not seem that the Cell was even seeking a conviction. All it wanted was the process as punishment.

Sharib Ali coordinates research on terror prosecution at the Quill Foundation, Delhi.