On 12th December 2019 after the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 was signed into law, protests erupted across the country. The Quill Foundation produced a report titled ‘Brutalizing Innocence’ on the detention, torture and criminalization of minors by the Uttar Pradesh police during the anti-CAA protests. The report is a collaborative factfinding investigation done by Quill Foundation, Haq Centre for Child Rights and Citizens Against Hate (CAH), undertaken between 10th and 24th January 2020, in the districts of Bijnor, Muzaffarnagar, Firozabad, Varanasi, Lucknow and Sambhal.
The Story of Ali
This report documents the police action against minors: its numbers, the intensity, methods used, the chilling effect on demands for accountability, violations of national and international law and the inaction of human rights institutions looking into the detention, torture, and criminalization of minors in UP. It contains documentary evidence of the nature of violence, the methods of custodial torture, intimidation, and post-release targeting by law enforcement agencies. It records the overall effects in individual cases and its patterns across the state of Uttar Pradesh. This extensive report that documents multiple factions of the violence and violations in UP is now part of the amicus briefing in the UP High court and is the basis for judicial orders. It also forms the basis for several UN communications to the government of India.
To supplement the report and its dissemination, I worked on an illustrated short loosely based on the events that happened in Uttar Pradesh. The story of Ali is the story of dozens of boys who were allegedly picked up the Uttar Pradesh Police and tortured in their custody and the aftermath of the incident.