Nine Hours, No Notice, Family Kept in the Dark: The Questions Delhi Police Haven't Answered on Ashish Joshi

On the morning of September 2, former bureaucrat Ashish Joshi left his home for a walk in Delhi's Nehru Park. He would not return for the better part of the day. At around 8:45 am, near the park gate, plainclothes personnel of the Delhi Police were waiting for him. By the time he was dropped back home that evening, Ashish Joshi had been questioned for close to nine hours, had been refused a copy of the FIR against him, and had spent most of the day unable to inform his wife of his whereabouts. 

Speaking to The Probe, Ashish Joshi laid out the sequence. "I left home for a walk in Nehru Park. A friend was with me, and at around 8:45, near the gate, the police were waiting for me," he said. "I asked them for their ID cards and they showed them. They said this was based on an FIR under Section 192 of the BNS." He was taken to the Counter Intelligence unit of the Delhi Police Special Cell in New Friends Colony, where he says he was brought around 10:30 am and held until close to 7 pm.

Ashish Joshi is a 1992-batch officer of the Indian Post and Telecommunication Accounts and Finance Service who retired on March 31, 2026, at additional secretary rank in the Union government. He has long used his voice to defend constitutional values and hold institutions to their obligations. He was suspended from service in 2019 after he wrote to the Delhi Police Commissioner seeking action against BJP leader Kapil Mishra over an allegedly incendiary video.

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The tweet behind the Delhi Police case

The case against Ashish Joshi was registered under Section 192 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita (BNS), the provision that deals with "wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot." According to Joshi, the FIR cites a post he made on August 26 calling for a "Nuremberg-style trial" of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. When he asked who had complained, he says he was told the Delhi Police had taken cognisance of the post on their own.

A retired officer's tweet demanding accountability from the Election Commission of India is an unusual foundation for a riot provocation case. Section 192 is aimed at conduct that is likely to set off actual public disorder. Whether a social media post criticising a constitutional authority clears that bar is the sort of question a court, and not a nine-hour interrogation, is meant to settle.

Ashish Joshi himself has pointed to the gap. In a post on X on September 4, he shared a video put out by the ruling party and asked the Delhi Police whether Section 192 would be applied to that content too, arguing that "a fair application of the law must be consistent." His point was blunt. If provocation is the test, it should be applied evenly, and not selectively against a government critic.

What the interrogation was really about

Joshi's account is that the FIR and the interrogation did not match. Although the case was booked over the Election Commission post, he says his questioners were focused on an entirely different tweet, one from the previous month about an alleged confrontation between Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Home Secretary Govind Mohan. That post was later withheld in India by X, which said it was acting on a legal demand.

"It is clear that the police were under pressure from the Home Minister's office. Probably they wanted to teach me a lesson," Joshi told The Probe. "They wanted to know where I got the information that there was a showdown between the Home Minister and the Home Secretary. They asked me for the source of the information. They took a list of all the people I had spoken to and why I spoke to each of them. I said it would be unethical and intellectually dishonest to disclose the source, and I would not reveal the source."

If Joshi's account is accurate, it points to an interrogation that used a riot provocation FIR as the entry point to press a citizen on the sourcing of an unrelated political post. The Delhi Police have not publicly explained the discrepancy.

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Where the Delhi Police appear to have crossed the line

This is the heart of it. Section 192 of the BNS is a minor offence, punishable at the lower end of the scale. For offences of this kind, the law does not contemplate plainclothes officers picking a person up on the street. Under Section 35 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, the successor to Section 41A of the old Criminal Procedure Code, the police are ordinarily required to issue a written notice directing a person to appear, rather than detaining them, where the offence carries a sentence below seven years. In Arnesh Kumar versus State of Bihar (2014), the Supreme Court made this restraint mandatory precisely to stop the reflexive use of custody in low-level cases. Ashish Joshi says he was served no such notice. He was simply intercepted on his walk.

The denial of the FIR copy compounds the problem. Joshi has said he repeatedly asked for the document during his detention and was refused, and that he has since submitted written representations to the Commissioner of Delhi Police and the DCP of the Special Cell seeking it. A person has a right to know the specific basis on which the state has taken away his liberty. Being told an FIR exists, being questioned on its strength for nine hours, and being denied sight of it is difficult to square with that right.

Then there is the matter of his family. For most of the day, Ashish Joshi was not allowed to tell his wife where he was. "Anyone would be distraught. Consider the plight of my family," he told The Probe. "If a husband steps out for a walk and then does not return home, how distraught will his wife be. I told them to just allow me to inform my wife, but they did not allow it." By his account, he was permitted to make a call only at about 6.30 pm.

On this point the law is unambiguous. In D K Basu versus State of West Bengal (1997), the Supreme Court laid down binding safeguards for anyone taken into custody, including the right to have a friend or relative informed of the detention as soon as possible. Joshi has called the conduct of the Delhi Police a "blatant violation" of that judgment and noted that informing a family member is a constitutional safeguard flowing from Article 22(1). "Informing an individual's family during interrogation or detention is a legal mandate, not an optional courtesy," he wrote, urging Commissioner Anurag Kumar to instruct all units accordingly.

The DK Basu guidelines apply to detention, not just formal arrest, so the choice of label does not remove the protections. On Joshi's account, he was held through the day and prevented from informing his wife until the evening. If that account is accurate, the safeguards the Supreme Court treats as mandatory were not observed.

In the evening, a crowd gathered outside the Special Cell office. Police sources said a senior officer decided to have Ashish Joshi dropped home in a police vehicle. "In the evening they told me they would drop me home. I said my vehicle was still there, and they said, no, we have been asked to drop you home," Joshi recalled. At around 7:30 pm he posted on X: "Just got back home. Delhi Special Cell dropped me home. Details later."

A pattern in the same week: the 4PM journalists

The questions around the Delhi Police did not end with Ashish Joshi. A day later, on September 3, two women journalists, Shaheen Khan of 4PM News Network and freelancer Nafisa Khan, alleged that Delhi Police personnel detained and assaulted them while they were covering an event at a private hospital in Saket attended by Amit Shah and Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta. 

Shaheen Khan alleged that the assault grew more severe after officers learnt she was Muslim, and the two said they were on their way to AIIMS for medico-legal certificates. Press bodies including the Press Club of India, the Indian Women's Press Corps and the Delhi Union of Journalists condemned the incident and demanded action against the personnel involved.

The Delhi Police have rejected that account. DCP (South) Anant Mittal said the claims were "totally false, misleading and baseless," stating that the two had parked their scooter on a designated VVIP route, obstructed it, and refused repeated requests to move before being taken to the station for enquiry. The allegations of assault and of religious targeting have not been independently verified, and 4PM has asked that CCTV footage from the venue and the police station be preserved and examined. Taken alongside the treatment of Ashish Joshi, the two episodes placed the conduct of the Delhi Police toward citizens and journalists who question authority under close scrutiny within a single week.

The questions that remain

The Delhi Police have not publicly answered the questions that matter. Why was a person picked up off the street, without notice, in a case the law says should ordinarily begin with a summons? Why was Ashish Joshi refused a copy of his own FIR? Why was his family kept uninformed for nearly a full day, in the face of a Supreme Court judgment that requires otherwise? And if his account holds, why did a case registered over one tweet become an interrogation about another? So far, the Delhi Police have offered no explanation.