"Under What Law?": The Signature Nobody Questioned at Hazaribag

Every Signature Was a Choice

Imagine you are the officer in charge of the holding centre. A woman arrives from the jail next door. Her prison sentence is over, but a file says she is a suspected foreigner and standing instructions say suspected foreigners are to be held pending verification.

You did not make that decision. Your job is to keep her until someone higher up decides otherwise. Years pass. Then a court acquits her under the Foreigners Act because no one ever produced proof that she is foreign. She is sent back to you.

The same file, the same instructions. Do you take her in?

Why the

hesitation is real The easy answer would be that the officials simply did wrong. But the hesitation at each step had a logic. An officer who releases a person the system has labelled a suspected foreigner risks being blamed if she disappears or turns out to be foreign.

Instructions on holding centres come from above and lower officials rarely have the authority to override them. Silence felt safe. Release felt risky. But that logic has a cost and it fell entirely on one person. She completed her sentence in 2020.

She was held more than 190 km from home, for a time as the centre's only detainee. Her records even listed her under a different name and a different father's name from her own, a basic identity error no one appears to have corrected.

In 2025 she escaped, saying she had been sexually assaulted repeatedly by a constable. A court then found no validated evidence that she was foreign at all. She was returned to detention anyway.

Inertia is a

decision Article 21 says no person shall be deprived of personal liberty except according to procedure established by law. Detention needs a legal basis at every moment, not just at the start. When the sentence ended in 2020, the basis for prison custody ended.

When the court acquitted her of the foreigner charge, the main ground for treating her as a foreigner was gone. Each official who kept her after that was not following the law. They were following a file. The philosopher Hannah Arendt warned that great wrongs can come from ordinary people doing their jobs without asking what those jobs mean.

No single person here decided to hold a woman without law for years. Many people simply did not decide to stop it.

Where

I land An officer in that position should refuse to continue detention without a written order citing a specific legal authority. If none exists, the officer should report it to the district magistrate and the legal services authority and seek release.

If the state still suspects she is foreign, the proper course is a lawful determination of nationality, not indefinite holding. That choice carries a cost. The officer may face pressure, scrutiny, even blame if the person cannot later be traced.

But the alternative is to make a person's liberty depend on no one being willing to take a risk.

For the exam, the insight is this: in public service, continuing a wrong is also a decision and "I was only following instructions" is not a defence when the law itself no longer supports the instruction.