A Delhi court has sentenced former AAP councillor Tahir Hussain and all co-accused in the high-profile murder of IB staff member Ankit Sharma to life imprisonment. It’s a monumental legal verdict on one of the most closely watched incidents in the northeast Delhi riots that have shaped our nation and which sent a loud bang across the country.
As the conviction was handed down, the presiding judge described the crime as an extremely grave and serious act that shook the conscience of society. In the court’s words, the terrible way violence and killing took place made society stop and think about the shared friction and breakdown of law and order which led to such barbarity. Although the prosecution had been aggressively calling for capital punishment with the conviction falling in the very rarest of rare categories, the court ultimately decided to send the individual to life imprisonment based on a variety of judicial criteria.
The legal process goes back to the harrowing communal violence that erupted across northeast Delhi in February 2020. Ankit Sharma, a 26-year-old Intelligence Bureau employee, disappeared during the height of the violence and his body was recovered from a local drain later. Sharma had been hunted down, attacked and killed by a mob. Tahir Hussain was constantly denying all of the allegations against him even though many of the witnesses and evidence pointed him to the planning and instigation of the violent assembly.
Tahir Hussain and the other convicted individuals will spend the rest of their natural lives behind bars for their roles in the murder. The full judicial order, however it is, is a step in the right direction to hold the culprits accountable and to bring the victims of the 2020 Delhi riots to justice.
