Everything Wrong (Legally) With Jignesh Mevani's Arrest by Assam Police

Police and magistrate ignored the SC's Arnesh Kumar guidelines, and the ingredients of offences are not made out.

There are a lot of things that one can say are wrong with the arrest of Jignesh Mevani.

Critics of the ruling government are being silenced. The prime minister is being treated like a monarch who cannot be critiqued, as though we have a lèse-majesté rule for Narendra Modi. Police in the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP)-ruled states are deliberately using heavy-handed cross-border arrests to create a chilling effect.

All of these may be true, but in themselves they won't help Mevani get out of the situation he is in. With the Congress party saying they will move the courts, including the Gauhati High Court, next week to secure his release, the focus now shifts to the legal remedies that could help the independent MLA from Gujarat.

Those legal remedies – whether quashing of the First Information Report (FIR) or bail – require us to examine whether there was anything legally wrong with the arrest of Mevani and the Kokrajhar magistrate's decision to remand him to three days of police custody.