Nuh: Tahir Hussain Ruparya is the go-to lawyer for all those caught in cow-slaughtering cases in Haryana’s Mewat. After all, he has a formidable record. Of the hundreds of cases he took up in the Nuh district court between 2011 and 2016, 99 per cent saw acquittal.
He fumbled around to clear the messy heap of loose paper files to find a spot to sit in his chamber no 125 at the Nuh District Court. And called out loudly to the 55-year-old client Gulla who was sauntering about in the corridor outside. Gulla has been acquitted in all the cow slaughter cases. And all of them were fought by Nuh’s star lawyer Ruparya.
Today, Gulla had come to just give an update about his life after his release from prison. Such is the rapport Ruparya enjoys with his clients that the relationship lasts long after the case is done with.
Gulla was arrested in 2016 from his Sudaka village when the cow parked outside his village home was picked up by the police and he was accused of preparing to slaughter it.
“After my case, people are now too scared to even keep cows at home to sell milk,” Gulla, 55-year-old said meekly.
The story is almost the same with most of his clients. So much so, Ruparya can quickly detect the pattern of falsehoods and loopholes in the cookie-cutter allegations.
“The court has acquitted most people in cow slaughter cases because most of these are fake and filed for extortion,” Tahir Hussain told ThePrint. “Most cases have the same script and you know it when you read it.”
Since Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar passed the stringent cow protection law in 2015, the Mewat region has seen an aggressive Hindu mobilisation of cow protection vigilante groups. Police complaints and arrests are rising under the Gauvansh Sanrakshan and Gausamvardhan Act (HGSG), 2015, which prohibits cow slaughter, smuggling and consumption of beef in the state. Activists and lawyers say that Muslims are being profiled and unfairly targeted.
And the numbers tell a sorry tale of dodgy FIRs, hurried chargesheets, weak investigation and prosecution.
Last year, around 400 cases were registered in the state under this law. Till December 2022, 1,192 cases were pending before the Nuh court.
According to Nuh police data, in the second half of 2022, out of 69 cases decided by the Nuh district and sessions court under the HGSG, only four cases have resulted in a conviction, while the acquittal rate stands at 94 per cent.
“If a person is taking a cow, how can you assume that he is taking it for slaughtering,”’ Ruparya asks in the court each time. asked It’s not just a rhetorical question. It has travelled out of police stations and courts and become a central political question in many parts of India. For Ruparya, it is often a case-clinching argument, a craft he learned from his lawyer-father Wali Mohammed.
Ruparya, appeared in the court on 4 March this year to advocate on as many as five cow slaughtering cases. He had a heated argument with the investigating officer. He kept badgering him about the identity of the accused who fled the crime scene. But the officer was unable to identify the man because he said he had seen him from the back. The back-and-forth became so heated that the judge had to intervene and calm them.
“In many cases, the police have been unable to identify the accused in court. When we ask the police in the court, is this the same person whom you saw running away from the crime? Then they argue that they had seen the absconder from a distance of 500 meters,” Ruparya said highlighting how a typical court trial in cow slaughter cases proceeds. “I look for loopholes to create doubts in such cases.”
He added that the police are often unable to produce conclusive evidence in court.
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The same script?
Every 19 December, since 2000, Meo Muslims in Haryana celebrate Mahatma Gandhi’s visit to Ghasera village of Nuh district as Mewat Day. During the Partition, Mahatma Gandhi stopped the Meo Muslims from going to Pakistan by visiting this village and calling them the ‘backbone of this country’.
But now, the village of 15,147 people, is struggling under a cloud of state suspicion and slander. Most of the people here have been slapped with cow smuggling/cow slaughter charges. some even have as many as ten cases registered against them.
Almost every Muslim home here knows of Ruparya. His phone number is one of the most shared among the villagers.
Ramzan was acquitted just three months ago in a 2016 case. He was transporting four cows in a small pick-up truck after buying them in Rajasthan when police arrested him on the tipoff by mysterious local informers.
He spent the next few years running between courts and finally seven months in prison before he got acquitted. His family now lives in fear of random police arrests and harassment because of his case. They hide and flee when the police come to their village.
“It seems that cow rearing is an act of terror and we are terrorists,” said Ramzan, who is lovingly called Kanhaiya by villagers. Many of the Meo Muslims in the village are converted Rajputs and still retain old names.
“Hindus in jail used to say that I have killed a cow, that’s why I am in jail,” he recalled.
According to the FIR, on 15 February 2016, the police were on patrol near the Sonkh bus stand when a secret informer called them. They were told that Ramzan, who was in the business of transporting cows, was driving from Haryana to Rajasthan and was passing through Barka Nala.
The police put up a barricade near the Tapkan canal bridge and found three people driving with some cows. On seeing the police, Ramzan fled from the spot into the mustard farms, leaving plastic packets and cows tied to ropes,. Ramzan and his cousin were taken into police custody through a separate recovery memo from their Ghasera village.
“In most of the cases, the police narrate the same story that we were patrolling and a cow smuggler tried to attack us. we narrowly escaped,” said Ruparya. “The question arises that if there was an attack then someone would have got hurt. But no one ever gets hurt. And the police are unable to provide evidence in this regard” In December 2020, the Nuh district court released Ramzan saying that establishing the identity of the accused beyond a reasonable doubt is the duty of the prosecution in such cases.
Finally, the court said in its ruling that the independent witnesses did not join the trial casting a “serious dent in the case of the prosecution”. It added that “the prosecution has failed to connect the accused with the present incident”.
According to Rupariya, in most cases, the complainant is a so-called ‘secret informer’ and many times the accused are not arrested at the scene of the crime, like with Ramzan. The prosecution fails to prove that the persons subsequently arrested by the police were actually present at the scene of the incident. In many cases, the complainants turn hostile and this has also led to higher acquittal rates in the cases.
“In many cases, the secret informer was not even present at the scene of the incident, so they are not able to appear in the court as witnesses. Due to this the case becomes weak,” said a public prosecutor on the condition of anonymity.
Lawyers Aziz Akhtar and Ruparya contend that the weapons presented by the police in the court often do not have any identification or FIR number on them. Sometimes they are not even sealed. “Then how can we believe that this weapon is linked to our client,” Akhtar asked.
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Convicted, but falsely implicated?
But acquittal is not in everyone’s destiny. 38-year-old Aasmin sits on the verandah of her house in Jadholi village. She’s trying to calm down her four-month-old daughter, crying in her arms, while holding up her ghunghat. She has been waiting for her husband Imran to come out of prison. It’s been a long wait for her and the family. The Nuh sessions court on 20 December last year, sentenced Imran Qureshi and his cousin Wakil to four and three years of imprisonment respectively and a fine of Rs 30,000 in a case of cow slaughter.
However, the family alleges that he has been falsely implicated.
They told the police that Imran had gone to his relative’s place for a wedding. Meat was being cut for wedding preparations. Someone informed the police and a raid was conducted at the wedding venue. Imran was sleeping in a house next to the venue “The accused man, who was present at the scene, fled and the police brought Imran from another house, clicked photographs with meat and choppers, and arrested him,” Arshida, Imran’s second wife, told ThePrint.
The family says that Imran’s photograph taken by the police became important evidence against him. “If that picture had not been there, this injustice would not have happened,” Aasmina said. However, the Public Prosecutor has claimed to identify the meat in court. He argued that Imran’s being caught at the scene of the crime makes the whole case stronger.
“It has been proved in the court that the meat recovered by the police was cow, according to The Forensic Science Laboratory report,” said public prosecutor Mohit Tanwar.
Imran’s advocate, Aziz Akhtar is sceptical about the veracity of the report. “The veterinary surgeon told the court that he ‘destroyed’ the meat on the first day itself while the investigating officer said that he ‘destroyed’ it,” he said. He questions whether the meat taken from the scene was the meat that was tested.
His family has filed an appeal in the Chandigarh High Court and is hoping to get relief soon. He has already been in prison for four months.
Raids and bribes
Ghasera villagers say the police and Bajrang Dal conduct routine raids on the slimmest of pretences. “Some such cases have also been seen in which the police have registered a case even when the cow is tied in the house because they have assumed that it will be killed. This is despite the court saying in its order that taking a cow does not mean that it is being taken for killing,” Akhtar told ThePrint. In July last year, the court of Chief Judicial Magistrate of Nuh, Shailza Gupta, had said in its order that there is no provision in the Indian Evidence Act which allows a presumption that if a cow is in the possession of a Muslim, then it should not be assumed that it’s been kept for slaughter.
“ Merely because these are non-milch, dry and sterile cows and are being taken by Muslims in some vehicle, we cannot raise any presumption that they are necessarily being taken for being slaughtered,” the court added.
In May 2021, the Punjab and Haryana High Court directed the Haryana government to inform the court about the power or authority vested in the cow vigilantes to raid the houses of citizens. At times, the vigilante members also accompany the police during their village raids.
“ Such actions are prima facie illegal and amount to taking law into their own hands by private individuals. This is contrary to the Rule of Law,” the court observed.
Gau Rakshaks, too, are very disappointed with the administration. Anup from Gau Raksha Dal Haryana expressed his displeasure with the police department and the Hindu community for not cooperating with them. He also accused the Police of releasing the culprits after taking the bribe.
“Police and our society do not support us. Even in the court, the accused are given bail the next day itself,” he claimed.
He claimed that around six months ago, he had caught a person from Sonipat’s Nehri village with beef and handed him over to the police.
“The man himself confessed that it was cow meat, but the police replaced it with buffalo meat and declared it as such,” alleged Anup. “The police take bribes from the accused and release them. And on the contrary, they filed cases against us.”
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Police’s point of view
It’s not easy for the police either. They are stuck between vigilante groups going on overdrive and the inability to produce solid fool-proof evidence in courts.
Nuh’s Superintendent of Police, Varun Singla, acknowledges that in many cases, courts have acquitted the accused due to a lack of evidence and identification problems. Along with this, he also throws light on other challenges.
“These criminals use fake IDs, stolen vehicles, which don’t have proper verification,” he said.
He also points to a lack of technical evidence from the crime scene as a reason for low conviction rates.
“The police fail to collect evidence like fingerprints from the spot. If they did this it would be easy to identify the accused, but due to weak investigation, the case starts depending on the witnesses, who are policemen in 90 per cent of the cases,” said a public prosecutor who did not want to be named.
In 2019, the Haryana DGP even ordered special training for police officers posted in Nuh to improve their investigations in cow slaughter cases.
“In this regard, they have used detailed SOPs to carry out the investigation in such cases. We have trained investigating officers which will surely lead to a better investigation,” Singla said.
Singla also rejected the allegations of the ‘same script’ being used in such cases. “ Each officer has proved his/her allegations in the court through his/her own testimony,” he added.
He sees the increase in rejection of bail as proof that police investigation has improved. “There has been an increase of 40 per cent bail rejections in these cases in the sessions and trial courts. This proves that our investigation has improved,” Singla claimed.
He added that the police have also taken the support of about 158 panchayats in curbing cases of cow slaughter.
Last September, as part of this outreach, 90 villages in Nuh held panchayats and passed resolutions ‘pledging’ to boycott, socially and otherwise, all those who are allegedly involved in these illegal activities.
But villagers and activists accuse Panchayats and local-level politicians for being whistleblowers in cases of cow smuggling.
RSS links
Ruparya was the president of the Nuh Bar Association in 2011 and 2016. Due to his networking and lobbying, he is seen at local political and social gatherings.
In December last year, when the Bharat Jodo Yatra led by Rahul Gandhi passed through Nuh, Ruparya walked with the former Congress president. He shared many problems related to the state with the Congress leader. But the issue of cow slaughter was missing from the list of complaints. “I asked Rahul to have a Punjab and Haryana High Court bench near Gurugram, for which he gave he agreed,” he said.
Other advocates of the court complex accuse him of being close to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.
“If anyone in this complex has the best relations with the RSS, it is Ruparya. He believes in taking everyone along, that’s why people accuse him of being close to the RSS,” Ruparya’s deputy Haroon, who has been working with him for the past 20 years, told ThePrint.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)