Delhi HC upholds seven-year sentences of five men in 2020 riots mob killing of 22-year-old Monish
Justice Madhu Jain dismissed all five appeals, holding that the beat constable who knew the accused placed them at the front of an armed mob shouting maaro maaro, and that Section 149 does not require proof of who struck the fatal blow.
The Delhi High Court has dismissed the appeals of five men convicted for the mob assault that killed 22-year-old Monish near Brijpuri in North-East Delhi on 25 February 2020, the second day of the communal violence in that part of the city. Justice Madhu Jain, sitting as a single judge, upheld the trial court's conviction of Aman Kashyap, Devinder Kumar, Pradeep Rai, Ashish alias Goli and Arun Kumar under Sections 148 and 304 Part I read with Section 149 of the Indian Penal Code, and the sentence of seven years' rigorous imprisonment. The judgment accepts that the only civilian witness who named the accused later withdrew the part of his account that had them beating the victim, that the three police eyewitnesses gave their statements more than a month late, and that no test identification parade was held. None of that, the court held, displaced the beat constable who knew all five by sight and placed them at the front of an armed crowd exhorting it to attack.
A young man in a red T-shirt, chased to the police barricade
The prosecution case was that at about 5 pm on 25 February 2020 a young man was set upon by a mob near Gali No. 3, Brijpuri, in the vicinity of Peer Baba Mazar, Chand Bagh. He was taken to Guru Teg Bahadur Hospital, where he died. He was later identified as Monish, aged about 22, son of Ali Sher.
The police learnt of him through the hospital. At about 8.40 pm that evening GTB Hospital reported two injured persons, one of them an unidentified male of about 22. ASI Vijyant Kumar collected MLC No. D-52/2020, which recorded that the man had been assaulted by a mob near Chand Bagh. His death was recorded the next day. On 29 February his father identified the body. The post-mortem report, No. 366/2020, attributed death to shock from ante-mortem injuries to the brain caused by blunt force impact.
FIR No. 87/2020 was registered at Police Station Dayalpur on 1 March 2020, under Sections 147, 148, 149, 427, 436 and 302 IPC and Sections 3 and 4 of the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act. The investigation passed from Inspector Hukam Singh to the Crime Branch, where Inspector Ritesh Kumar took it over.
Call records showed the deceased's phone active until about 5.07 pm on 25 February, last located near Brijpuri Road. His cousin Ibrahim said Monish had spoken to him while travelling home and had never arrived. A local resident, Manoj Kaniyal, told investigators he had seen the incident and named local men, including the appellants, as leading the mob. The investigators then went through the duty roster of the police personnel posted at Brijpuri T-Point that day. Three of them, Constable Piyush, Head Constable Deepak and Constable Vineet, said they had watched a young man in a red T-shirt and yellow lower being chased and beaten by a mob before the police drove the crowd off and sent him to GTB Hospital in an autorickshaw. Piyush, the beat constable for the area, said he recognised the appellants at the front of the crowd, carrying weapons and urging others on.
Aman Kashyap, Arun Kumar and Ashish were apprehended on 1 April 2020. The charge sheet of 25 June 2020 named seven accused: the five appellants plus Krishan Kant and Rahul Bhardwaj, the last two charged under Section 379 read with 34 IPC for allegedly taking the deceased's mobile phone. Charges for conspiracy, unlawful assembly, rioting and murder were framed on 31 July 2021, with a Section 188 IPC charge added on 16 January 2023.
What the trial court did with 18 witnesses
The prosecution examined 18 witnesses before Additional Sessions Judge-03, North-East District, Karkardooma Courts. Five mattered for the occurrence and identification: Shashi Kant (PW-1), Manoj Kaniyal (PW-5), Constable Piyush (PW-10), Head Constable Deepak (PW-12) and Constable Vineet (PW-13).
By judgment of 30 November 2024 in Sessions Case No. 199/2021 the trial court convicted the five appellants under Sections 148 and 304 Part I read with 149 IPC and acquitted Krishan Kant and Rahul Bhardwaj. It expressly found that the prosecution had not established which accused inflicted the fatal head injuries, and for that reason brought the offence down from murder to culpable homicide not amounting to murder, resting liability on Section 149. On 13 January 2025 it sentenced each of the five to one year's simple imprisonment under Section 148 and seven years' rigorous imprisonment with a fine of Rs 30,000 under Section 304 Part I, with two years' simple imprisonment in default, the sentences to run concurrently.
Five appeals followed: CRL.A. 133/2025 by Aman Kashyap, 180/2025 by Devinder Kumar, 181/2025 by Pradeep Rai, 185/2025 by Ashish alias Goli and 289/2025 by Arun Kumar. Mr Faraz Anees and Mr Kartik Vashisht appeared for the appellants; Mr Rajat Nair, Special Public Prosecutor, with Mr Dhruv Pande, Mr Imon Bhattacharya and Mr Sarthak, for the State. The appeals were reserved on 9 October 2026 and decided together on 27 October.
The defence: a witness who took it back, and police who waited a month
Counsel for the appellants built the challenge around the identification evidence. The FIR came five days after the incident, even though several police officials were said to have watched the assault and known the assailants; none made a written complaint or a daily diary entry. The MLC placed the assault near Chand Bagh, while the witnesses spoke of Brijpuri Pulia and the area near Aggarwal Sweets, some distance away. A PCR call attributed to Shashi Kant at about 6.10 pm reported a boy lying near Aggarwal Sweets, yet the prosecution said the deceased was already on the hospital CCTV at 5.49 pm.
The independent witnesses, counsel argued, did not support the case. Manoj Kaniyal told the trial court he had identified no one in the mob and denied the suggestions put to him. Shashi Kant, who had attributed the assault to the accused in his first deposition on 21 August 2021, said on 21 February 2022 that none of the accused in court was among the assailants; cross-examined by the prosecutor, he identified the five but said he had only seen them in the mob, not beating the victim, and blamed the earlier record on evidence taken through video conferencing. His statements under Sections 161 and 164 CrPC could not become substantive evidence once he had abandoned them.
The police witnesses were the main target. About ten officials were deployed in the area, statements of only six were recorded, and three were examined as eyewitnesses. Piyush, the beat constable who said he knew the appellants beforehand, admitted he made no written complaint and no DD entry; his Section 161 statement was recorded on 1 April 2020, more than a month after the incident, and nothing showed he had reported the matter to the SHO as he claimed. Deepak and Vineet both acknowledged that the names had come to them from Piyush. Deepak had never been beat constable in Brijpuri and had given no written report; Vineet knew no one in the mob and said Piyush pointed the five out to him. No TIP was held, and Vineet said he saw two of the men for only the second time when he came to court on 2 May 2023.
Counsel also pressed the inconsistencies between the three accounts, the investigating officer's admission that no policeman had approached him on his own as an eyewitness, the non-production of video footage used during investigation, the gap in the appellants' call records between 5 pm and 6 pm, the recovery of a sword from beneath a diwan at Aman Kashyap's house without any forensic link to the injuries or the father's signature on the seizure memo, and the failure to trace the autorickshaw driver. Even on the prosecution's own evidence, they argued, presence in a large gathering was not membership of an unlawful assembly sharing a common object, and nothing established the intention needed for Section 304 Part I.
The State: riots, a jammed PCR system and a constable who knew the faces
Mr Nair answered that the incident happened in the middle of the riots of 24 and 25 February 2020, when the police were stretched across the district and the PCR system was struggling under the volume of calls; the delay in tracing Shashi Kant's call and in registering the FIR had to be read in that light. The deceased's movement towards Brijpuri Road was shown by his call records and his cousin's account; his uncle Shabir Ali identified him in the hospital footage at about 5.49 pm. The MLC's reference to Chand Bagh proved nothing about where the assault took place, because the hospital was flooded with injured people and the person who brought him in was never identified. The hospital CCTV, the State clarified, was never used to identify the accused, only the injured man.
Shashi Kant's retreat did not require the rejection of his whole testimony, and his Section 164 statement could corroborate or contradict him. The three police witnesses consistently described a young man in a red T-shirt chased by a mob, falling near the barricades by the water plant wall and being beaten there before the police intervened. Piyush knew the appellants as beat constable, and Deepak and Vineet identified them in court; the absence of a TIP did not make that evidence inadmissible. The delay in recording statements was explained by the number of riot cases under simultaneous investigation and by Piyush not knowing that the injured man had died or that this FIR existed.
The State relied on Vijaya Singh v. State of Uttarakhand, 2024 SCC OnLine SC 3510, and R. Shaji v. State of Kerala, (2013) 14 SCC 266, on Section 164 statements; Raja v. State, (2020) 15 SCC 562, and Malkhansingh v. State of M.P., (2003) 5 SCC 746, on identification without a TIP; Girja Prasad v. State of M.P., (2007) 7 SCC 625, Tahir v. State (Delhi), (1996) 3 SCC 338, and Baldev Singh v. State of Haryana, (2015) 17 SCC 554, on police witnesses; and Firoz Khan Akbarkhan v. State of Maharashtra, 2025 SCC OnLine SC 627, on investigative lapses. The trial court, Mr Nair said, had already made the concession the evidence demanded by limiting the conviction to Section 304 Part I once no one could be shown to have struck the fatal blow.
Shashi Kant counts only for the mob, and Manoj Kaniyal not at all
Justice Jain began with what was not in dispute: the medical evidence established that Monish died of the injuries sustained on 25 February 2020. The appeals therefore turned on identification, participation and the extent of liability.
On Shashi Kant, the judge applied State of U.P. v. M.K. Anthony, (1985) 1 SCC 505, which requires a court to ask whether a witness's testimony read as a whole has a ring of truth before weighing its inconsistencies, rather than lifting individual sentences out of context. Both parts of his sworn evidence had to be taken into account. His clarification of 21 February 2022, that he had seen the five appellants as members of the mob but had not seen them beating the deceased, could not be ignored. His Section 164 statement could not on its own establish their participation in the assault. But he had never withdrawn his identification of the five as people present in the mob that was involved in the occurrence, and to that limited extent his evidence retained its value. Manoj Kaniyal, who identified no one in court and denied the prosecution's suggestions, could not be used to identify the assailants at all, though his account of a violent mob in the Brijpuri area at the relevant time matched the broader picture. The identification question, the judge said, had to be decided principally on Piyush, Deepak and Vineet.
Police witnesses, no TIP and a month's delay
Piyush had identified all five appellants as men at the forefront of the armed mob, exhorting others by shouting ‘maaro maaro’, and had said he knew them from before through his beat duties. Deepak and Vineet substantially corroborated him on the deceased being pursued, the assault near the barricades and the police intervention. They had got the names from Piyush, but they said they had personally seen the men he pointed out during the occurrence and they identified them in court.
The argument that these witnesses were policemen and so suspect failed on Girja Prasad: the testimony of a police official cannot be discarded for his status alone and must be assessed on its merits. Here the duty records placed the three at the picket, and their accounts matched on how the deceased was chased, beaten and rescued.
On the absence of a TIP, the judge drew on Malkhansingh. Identification in court is substantive evidence; a TIP ordinarily serves to test a witness's ability to identify a stranger during investigation, and its absence goes to weight, not admissibility. Piyush's identification stood on a different footing from the identification of a previously unknown person, because he claimed prior acquaintance with all five from his posting as beat constable. Deepak and Vineet were not independent of him as far as names went, but their evidence supported the occurrence and the contemporaneous pointing out of the persons involved.
The delay was the point the judge treated most seriously. The incident was on 25 February 2020; the three statements were recorded on 1 April 2020. That gap, she said, was substantial and warranted scrutiny, all the more because Piyush claimed to know the appellants. Under State of U.P. v. Satish, (2005) 3 SCC 114, delay in recording a Section 161 statement does not automatically make the testimony unreliable; everything depends on the explanation and the surrounding circumstances. Inspector Ritesh Kumar Sharma, the investigating officer, admitted the police personnel had not come to him on their own, and explained that several riot cases were being investigated at once and that Piyush did not know the injured man had died or that an FIR existed. That explanation, the judge wrote, “cannot be accepted mechanically merely because the incident occurred during the riots”. But read against the circumstances of the time, and with Piyush's evidence corroborated by Deepak and Vineet, the delay did not by itself discredit the occurrence or show that the appellants had been falsely implicated.
The remaining objections were dealt with briefly. Where an injured person is said to have been brought from is not independent proof of where he was attacked, so the Chand Bagh and Aggarwal Sweets references did not undo the police account. The hospital CCTV identified the injured man, not the accused, so the absence of footage showing the appellants was not the withholding of direct evidence. The call-detail records cut neither way: they show the approximate location of a device, not its user, so the lack of an entry placing an appellant at the spot could not contradict reliable ocular evidence, and the court equally declined to treat the records as proof of participation. The investigative deficiencies were acknowledged, but under Firoz Khan Akbarkhan they do not displace ocular evidence found otherwise reliable.
Section 149: more than mere presence in a crowd
Because the trial court had found no one responsible for the fatal head injuries, the conviction rested entirely on Section 149, and Justice Jain examined whether its ingredients were made out. Masalti v. State of U.P., AIR 1965 SC 202, holds that where an offence is committed by a member of an unlawful assembly in prosecution of its common object, the prosecution need not prove an individual overt act by every member, but the court must first be satisfied that the accused was a member and shared the common object or knowledge. Lalji v. State of U.P., (1989) 1 SCC 437, allows the common object to be inferred from the nature of the assembly, the weapons carried and the conduct of its members. Kuldip Yadav v. State of Bihar, (2011) 5 SCC 324, supplies the limit: the court must record a clear finding on the common object and its unlawful character, and mere presence in an assembly, or possession of a weapon, is not enough.
Applying that, the judge found the evidence established more than presence in a crowd. Piyush had identified all five at the forefront of the armed mob exhorting others to assault the deceased, who was pursued, surrounded and beaten even after he had fallen near the police barricades. The conduct attributed to the appellants, the weapons carried by the mob and the continued assault together supported the conclusion that the assembly had an unlawful common object of assaulting the deceased and causing him bodily harm. Once that was established, the absence of proof of who inflicted the fatal injuries did not absolve the appellants; they could not claim acquittal because the prosecution could not say which member of the mob caused the head injuries recorded in the post-mortem report.
Why Part I and not Part II
The last question was whether the offence fell under Part I or Part II of Section 304. Part I applies where the act causing death is accompanied by the intention to cause death or such bodily injury as is likely to cause death; Part II where there is only knowledge that death is likely. Justice Jain drew the distinction between intention and knowledge from Virsa Singh v. State of Punjab, AIR 1958 SC 465, a decision on Section 300 whose reasoning she found material here. The manner of the assault, she held, bore on the mental element: an armed mob pursued the deceased, attacked him after he fell near the barricades and subjected him to repeated blows, including to the head. Those circumstances were capable of supporting an inference of an intention to cause bodily injuries likely to result in death, and the weapons, the exhortations attributed to the appellants and the manner of the assault had to be read together in deciding whether an offence carrying that intention was committed in prosecution of the common object or was one the members knew was likely to be committed. The conclusion, the judgment says, must rest on those proved circumstances rather than on the mere fact of death. The court did not disturb the trial court's classification.
Order
CRL.A. 133/2025, 180/2025, 181/2025, 185/2025 and 289/2025 were dismissed. The common judgment of conviction of 30 November 2024 and the order on sentence of 13 January 2025 of the Additional Sessions Judge-03, North-East District, Karkardooma Courts, in Sessions Case No. 199/2021, arising from FIR No. 87/2020 of Police Station Dayalpur, stand upheld in respect of the five appellants. Pending applications, including the bail applications filed with each appeal, were disposed of in terms of the judgment. A copy of the judgment with the trial court record is to be sent to the Jail Superintendent and the trial court for compliance.