Four years after communal violence erupted in Khargone during Ram Navami in April 2022, the criminal justice process has yet to produce a conviction.
Sixty-five cases were registered after the violence. Around 20 cases are still being heard in local courts at different stages, and around 60 accused remain untraced, according to police sources. Now, in one of the cases that reached judgment, a sessions court has acquitted all 11 accused. Over a month after the acquittal on 27 July, the Madhya Pradesh government is reviewing the verdict and is expected to challenge it in the High Court.
The acquittal, however, does not mean that the violence did not happen. The sessions court has accepted that the incident took place. What the prosecution failed to establish was that these 11 men were responsible for the offences with which they were charged.
That distinction is important. It also raises a larger question about the aftermath of the Khargone violence: If the riot happened, why has the State struggled to establish individual criminal responsibility for it?
Hostile or Scared Witnesses
In the aftermath of the recent judgment, Additional Government Public Prosecutor Yuvraj Gujrathi said the Madhya Pradesh government was in the process of obtaining permission to challenge the acquittal, as well as pointed to the difficulty faced by the prosecution during the trial.
Witnesses did not support the prosecution, he said, and some turned hostile. Fear, according to Gujrathi, was one of the reasons. People were reluctant to stand up and identify those accused of participating in the violence because they feared what might happen to them and their families afterwards. Who would protect them? What safeguards would be available if those they identified returned to their locality?
Some witnesses, he said, live in Muslim-majority areas and were worried about the safety of their families. But identification itself became a contentious issue. There was no test identification parade in the case. Gujrathi had earlier described this as a police lacuna. The police, however, offer a different explanation.
A police officer, who was involved in the investigation, said there was no point in holding an identification parade because the FIR itself recorded that the rioters had covered their faces while participating in the violence. “If their faces were covered, there was no question of identifying them,” he reasoned.
The two explanations expose the difficulty at the heart of the case.
The prosecution said witnesses were unable or unwilling to identify the accused.
The police said the circumstances described in the FIR made a conventional identification parade impractical.
But that leaves the larger question unanswered: If the faces of the rioters were covered and there was no identification parade, how were the identities of those subsequently accused established?
The answer becomes particularly important because the court ultimately found the evidence insufficient to convict the 11 men. Eight prosecution witnesses did not identify the accused. The identification evidence presented by the prosecution also faced difficulties, while forensic evidence did not substantiate some of the allegations against the accused.
Investigating a Riot
The case, therefore, demonstrates one of the most difficult challenges in investigating communal violence: moving from the undeniable fact of collective violence to establishing the individual role of each accused.
The two are not the same. A riot can be real. The guilt of an individual accused of participating in it still has to be proved. And that requires an investigation capable of establishing identity through credible and independent evidence.
The question of electronic evidence is equally important. The government prosecutor said, "The footage could not be played in the court." He said that there might be some technical problem behind it.
Given the difficulty over eyewitness identification, the footage could potentially have helped establish the role of individual accused. The question, therefore, is what happened to the evidence in the four years between the violence and the trial. Was the original footage preserved and examined, and what efforts were made to make it usable in court?
These questions matter because when eyewitnesses fail to identify the accused and electronic evidence cannot be effectively presented, the prosecution's ability to establish individual guilt becomes considerably weaker.
Once the immediate violence ends, investigators have to reconstruct events, identify individual perpetrators, preserve evidence, and build cases that can withstand scrutiny years later in a courtroom. Khargone's record raises questions about whether that transition was successfully made.
The problem is visible beyond the 11-men case. Police sources say around 60 accused remain untraced. But even here, there is an important qualification. Police say many of these are not necessarily known individuals deliberately evading arrest.
An officer involved in investigations revealed,
"Their names in the cases are often generic and are not accompanied by sufficient identifying details such as the father's name, locality or other particulars. That makes it difficult for investigators to establish who exactly the person is and where they can be found."
It is another indication of the basic problem facing the investigation: Identifying an individual accused after a riot is considerably harder than naming a suspect in the immediate aftermath. The political context makes the issue even more significant.
The Khargone violence occurred roughly a year before the 2023 Madhya Pradesh Assembly election. At the time, then Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan promised a forceful response.
He declared, “There is no place for rioters on the soil of Madhya Pradesh… They will not be spared. Strictest action will be taken against them."
The message was unmistakable: those responsible for the violence would face the full force of the State. But criminal justice operates according to a different logic.
Strict action must ultimately be based on evidence. An FIR is not proof of guilt. An arrest is not proof of guilt. Being named as an accused is not proof of guilt. The State has to establish what each individual did.
Why No Conviction is Crucially Harmful
That is why the absence of a conviction so far deserves attention, even though around 20 cases remain pending in courts. It would be premature to declare that the entire Khargone prosecution has failed.
The pending cases may still result in convictions. But four years after the violence, the absence of a conviction raises legitimate questions about the effectiveness of the investigation and prosecution.
The Association for Protection of Civil Rights (APCR), which provided legal assistance to people accused in the cases, believes the problem was more fundamental. Zaid Pathan, coordinator of APCR Indore, tells The Quint that both Hindus and Muslims were involved in the violence but alleges that criminal cases were disproportionately registered against Muslims. He says people who were not involved in the violence were also jailed.
These are serious allegations and need to be tested against the complete police and court records. But the acquittal of the 11 men makes it relevant to examine how suspects were selected, what evidence connected them to specific offences, and whether investigators adequately distinguished between those who participated in the violence and those who were merely suspected.
Pathan says APCR provided legal assistance to the accused and fought their case, ultimately helping them secure an acquittal.
He also says that the National Security Act (NSA) was invoked against him in connection with his activities relating to peace efforts in Khargone. His account points to the atmosphere in which the post-riot investigation and legal proceedings unfolded.
Erasing the Violence
But the fear was not limited to activists or accused persons. According to Gujrathi, witnesses themselves were afraid. They feared retaliation and worried about the safety of their families if they identified those accused of participating in the violence. That presents the State with a difficult challenge.
A witness cannot reasonably be expected to risk the safety of his family merely to provide an identification. In communal violence cases, witness protection can become as important as the evidence itself. But where eyewitness identification is compromised by fear, or impossible because the perpetrators concealed their faces, the burden on investigators to collect independent evidence becomes even greater. CCTV footage, photographs, forensic material, mobile-phone data, location records and other forms of corroboration can potentially help establish an accused person's role.
If those avenues are not adequately explored, the prosecution may eventually be left with little more than statements that do not survive the trial. The acquittal of the 11 men should, therefore, be understood carefully. It does not establish that they were factually innocent.
Nor does it erase the violence that Khargone witnessed in April 2022. It establishes that the prosecution failed to prove their guilt to the standard required by criminal law. That standard is not a technical obstacle to justice. It is the safeguard that separates suspicion from conviction.
And it cuts both ways. If people who actually participated in the riots escape because investigators failed to collect sufficient evidence, the victims are denied justice. If people who did not participate are arrested and prosecuted because investigators failed to establish their identity or role properly, they too are denied justice. Both outcomes weaken public faith in the law. This is why the government's proposed appeal against the acquittal should be accompanied with a broader examination of the Khargone investigation.
But an appeal can determine whether the trial court correctly assessed the evidence before it. It cannot retrospectively create evidence that investigators failed to collect.
The High Court may eventually decide whether the acquittal of the 11 men was justified. But the more uncomfortable questions remain. Why was there no test identification parade? Was the police right that it would have served no purpose because the rioters' faces were covered? If so, what other identification methods were used? How much CCTV and video evidence was available, and how much of it could actually be examined? Why do around 60 accused remain untraced, and why were so many recorded without sufficient identifying particulars? And why, four years after the violence, has there been no conviction in any of the cases?
The answers matter because the objective of a riot investigation should not be to produce a particular number of arrests. It should be to identify the people who committed specific crimes and build cases strong enough to prove those allegations in court.
The political system can promise the “strictest action”. The police can register cases. The government can appeal an acquittal. But, ultimately, the courtroom asks a narrower question: "Who did what and where is the evidence?"
The violence in Khargone was real.
The demand for justice is real too. But justice requires both things to be true at the same time: that those responsible are punished, and that those who cannot be proved responsible are not. Four years later, Khargone is still waiting for the criminal justice system to complete that task.
(Deshdeep Saxena is an independent journalist reporting on news and politics from Madhya Pradesh.)