New Delhi: On May 12, 2026, Noida District Magistrate, Medha Roopam, shot off a letter to the Uttar Pradesh home secretary in Lucknow, saying that she had approved the preventive detention of Satyam Verma under the National Security Act.Satyam Verma had worked with the UNI Varta (United News of India) news agency between 1991 and 2004. Since he went freelance, he has translated the works of French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac, known for his critique of bourgeois society’s moral double standards, Upton Sinclair, an American novelist whose writings documented the working conditions of immigrant workers in Chicago’s meat packing industry in 1906, Mark Twain, a 19th century American satirist whose writings took on the practice of slavery, and historian Romila Thapar whose work focuses on the social and cultural history of early India.At the time when the NSA was invoked against him, Verma had been lodged in the Gautam Buddh Nagar District jail for a month. What were the circumstances that led to Roopam writing the letter to the Lucknow home secretary? What was the evidence that Roopam considered? How did Noida police go about justifying the move of slapping such a stringent and draconian law on a journalist? This report will attempt to answer these questions.§Medha Roopam, who took charge as Noida’s first woman District Magistrate in July 2025, and is the daughter of the current Chief Election Commissioner of India, Gyanesh Kumar, wrote in her abovementioned letter:“Regarding the approval of the detention order under the National Security Act (NSA), 1980, with respect to Satyam Verma, age 61, in order to prevent [him] from any activity which is prejudicial to the maintenance of public order, under Section 3(2) of the NSA, this detention order has been approved by me in public interest.”In doing so, she invoked the powers of her office under Section 3 of the NSA Act, 1980, which allows the Union or a state government to detain an individual if it is satisfied that the move will prevent him from “acting in any manner prejudicial to the defence of India, the relation of India with foreign powers, or the security of India.” As per Section 3, clause 3 of the NSA Act, the period of such detention once approved by the state government cannot “exceed three months” but the said order can be amended “to extend such [a] period from time to time by any period not exceeding three months at any one time.”In another letter, also dated May 12, 2026, addressed to the station house officer (SHO) of Phase-2 police station in Gautam Buddh Nagar, the district magistrate instructed that “relatives of Satyam Verma in Lucknow be informed about my order regarding invocation of provisions related to the NSA Act.” For an idea of what led Roopam to arrive at this conclusion, one needs to go to April 2026.A protest in NoidaA protest by factory workers across Noida’s industrial belt turned violent on April 13, leading to the demonstrators pelting stones, vandalising vehicles and setting some of them on fire. A day after the violence, The Wire’s ground report found out that many workers had been pushed to the edge by being paid Rs 13,000 a month for 16-18 hour daily shifts, their in-hand salary simply not enough to cope with expenses amid the LPG crisis triggered by the West Asia war.On April 17, Satyam Verma was arrested from Lucknow’s Jan Chetna Bookstore over what police claimed was his involvement in these protests. His lawyers called this an illegal detention. Verma was made an accused in the Noida workers’ protest case along with six labour rights activists – Srishti Gupta , Manisha Thakur, Rupesh Roy, Aditya Anand, Himanshu Thakur and Yogesh Meena – and a student activist, Akriti Choudhary.Provisions of the NSA were invoked against Verma and Choudhury.The Wire has accessed the 170-page proposal sent by the Noida Police to District Magistrate Medha Roopam, seeking clearance for the invocation of NSA in this case. Along with court documents and police case diaries, this reporter also examined an 82-page dossier comprising Telegram chats submitted before the Surajpur District Court in Noida on May 29, to understand the police’s case against Verma. Following extensive interviews with Satyam Verma’s colleagues and friends in Lucknow, his lawyers, legal experts and police eye witnesses, The Wire has pieced together the chain of events and examining evidence relied upon by the police. Here’s what we found:An annexure which is part of the 13-page police report submitted on May 9 is a verbatim copy of a thread posted by a right-wing handle on April 14, 2026, which tried to villanise the protest itself.A June 2024 pro-Palestine gathering attended by former MP and general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the late Sitaram Yechury, former CPI(M) MP Brinda Karat and AAP MLA and then Delhi deputy mayor Aaley Mohammad Iqbal is mentioned among public protests which have been labelled as a “protest franchise with the ideological constant [being] anti-fascist revolution against the Indian state.”The police claims that Verma had “prior information about the protesters, their active involvement” and referred to him “psychologically being able to push a worker mentally towards violence, despite being an intellectual, a writer and publisher”. This, the police claims, connects Verma with the violent protest.Identity of journalist Satyam Verma as an accused who was reportedly present on the protest site, is based on the statement of a mukhbir (police informer) who as per his own statement is “not sure” about the face visible in a viral video related to the protests.Over the last two months, journalists’ groups such as the Delhi Union of Journalists (DUJ) and the Press Club of India have extended support to Verma. While the DUJ, in a statement, “condemned the UP Police’s decision to invoke provisions of the NSA against senior journalist and editor of Mazdoor Bigul magazine”, the Press Club of India reiterated that “writing about workers’ rights and reporting on labour issues is part of journalism, not a crime in democracy.”Flames billow as a police bike is set ablaze by factory workers during a protest demanding a hike in wages, in Noida, Gautam Buddh Nagar district, Uttar Pradesh, Monday, April 13, 2026. The protest carried incidents of arson, vandalism and stone-pelting reported from Phase-2 and Sector 60 areas, police said. Photo: PTIThe support extended to Verma by journalists’ bodies stems from a larger debate surrounding the workers’ protest that preceded Verma’s arrest.As Navsharan Singh, Atul Sood and Rakhi Sehgal noted in their four-part series for The Wire, there was a demonisation – largely aided by mainstream television news – of protests that took place from Haryana’s Panipat district to Noida in Uttar Pradesh over legitimate demands. It recast workers as a threatening mass and framed the unrest in the language of provocation and national-security threat. “In that shift, the workers’ demands for wages and dignity were no longer treated as a question of fairness and became something to be managed through surveillance, detention, criminal law and political suspicion,” the authors wrote.The UP administration has since hiked the minimum wages in Noida and Ghaziabad by 21%, but has not let go of the convenient scapegoats it appears to have found for the unrest in April: activists and a journalist. Police annexure content lifted verbatim from an X handleOn May 9, Inspector Raghvendra Singh, posted at Noida’s Phase-2 police station that comes under the purview of Gautam Buddh Nagar police commissionerate, sent a 13-page report as part of the NSA-related procedural formalities to the Deputy Commissioner of Police (DCP) for Central Noida. District Magistrate Medha Roopam’s final go-ahead in invoking the NSA against Verma was based on this police report. In the subject matter of his report presented before DCP Central Noida, Inspector Raghvendra mentioned that the document submitted was “based on evidence in connection with the workers’ unrest and violence witnessed in Noida Industrial Area between April 10, 2026 to April 15, 2026 with the chain of events related to the criminal liability and conspiracy on the part of Satyam Verma who is linked to Revolutionary Workers Party of India (Delhi) [RWPI] and Mazdoor Bigul Newspaper (Lucknow).”“Evidence has come to light that shows hyperactivity of RWPI in the industrial areas of the National Capital Region (NCR) since 2023. Satyam Verma has been part of the ‘Bigul Media’ group which has Aditya Anand as the admin and core group coordinator. Along with this, he [Verma] is associated with the Facebook page of this newspaper [Mazdoor Bigul]. Satyam Verma is also a part of the ‘Mazdoor Bigul’ Telegram channel which primarily laid down grounds for a violent protest in Phase-2 as a hotspot,” the police’ report mentioned. The report by Noida Police also included a list of 17 annexures which were supposed to be pieces of evidence cited as grounds that made it a fit case for NSA. Annexure number 3 in this list is a document titled ‘An overview of multifront agitation engine RWPI’, described by the police as – ‘article on the structure of RWPI (RWPI का संरचनात्मक आलेख).’Curiously, while the entire NSA case diary mostly comprises documents in Hindi, this four-page annexure is entirely in English and is labelled by the police as ‘संलग्नक संख्या – 03’ (annexure number 3).This ‘Annexure No. 3’ appears to have been copied verbatim from a thread posted on X on April 14, 2026, a day after violence, by a handle named ‘The Chronology’.It’s difficult to understand the rationale behind the Noida Police copy-pasting a 21-tweet thread as part of its evidence.Some of the opening lines in Annexure no. 3 submitted as evidence by the Noida Police state: “The actual workers at the centre of both disputes were largely absent from the visible protest activity. What was present, at both sites simultaneously, was the cadre of Mazdoor Bigul/ Bigul Mazdoor Dasta, the street organising arm of the Revolutionary Workers’ Party of India (RWPI).” The above lines have been copy-pasted from the third tweet in the thread posted by the X handle, The Chronology, without a single word being altered.A tweet from The Chronology which have been reproduced verbatim in the Noida Police’s annexure 3 on the NSA against Satyam Verma.Under the header, ‘RWPI and Bigul Mazdoor Dasta: The Organizational Twin’, five protests were named: the labour agitation in the NCR industrial belt, the Delhi pollution protest (which the police claims was a “Maoist Signal”), the Gaza protests in Mumbai, the protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act-National Register of Citizens agitation, and the campaign against the labour codes campaign. “RWPI and Bigul Mazdoor Dasta are operationally inseparable. The division of roles is tactical: the dasta mobilises workers on the ground; RWPI provides political legitimacy and institutional presence,” the Noida Police noted in its remarks in this annexure.This part is also lifted verbatim from the seventh tweet in the 21-post thread by The Chronology. The details relating to each of these protests, as referred to by the Noida Police in the annexure, be it Delhi pollution protest or Gaza protests or even CAA-NRC agitation for that matter is content which has been copy-pasted from the right-wing handle.Tweets from The Chronology which have been reproduced verbatim in the Noida Police’s annexure 3 on the NSA against Satyam Verma.A quick scan of the X handle @TheChronology__ shows that it goes by the bio line ‘decoding & simplifying stories’ and follows only two other verified X handles which include those of President Droupadi Murmu and the Office of the Prime Minister of India. The Islamophobia of the account is hard to ignore when one takes into account the post where it takes a dig at a Muslim man offering namaz during ongoing protests by the Cockroach Janta Party at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar. In another post the handle considers it necessary to point out that the writer of a Reuters story on the possibility of a cabinet reshuffle amidst the clamour for Union minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation is a Muslim journalist.Tweets from The Chronology which have been reproduced verbatim in the Noida Police’s annexure 3 on the NSA against Satyam Verma.The X account leads one to a website of the same name which is a bigger right-wing platform with speculative and baseless stories titled ‘George Soros and Mohammed Zubair’ and ‘Ravish Kumar’s connection with the Deep State’ published on the online platform. ‘Opposition ecosystem interface’The fourth and final page of Annexure no. 3 carries a sub-head titled ‘Opposition Ecosystem Interface.’ The content under this sub-head was also lifted verbatim from The Chronology’s X thread. It refers to a pro-Palestine protest held in June 2024 and attended by CPI(M) leaders the late Sitaram Yechury and Brinda Karat, along with the then Deputy Mayor of Delhi, Aaley Muhammad Iqbal.“At the June 2024 Palestine Solidarity Committee protest at Jantar Mantar, RWPI shared the stage with CPI(M) leaders Sitaram Yechury and Brinda Karat alongside AAP Delhi Deputy Mayor Aaley Mohammad Iqbal. A fringe ML [Marxist-Leninist] party appearing on the same platform as mainstream opposition figures signals a degree of political normalisation that warrants monitoring,” says the police’s report.How is a pro-Palestine protest – a public event held two years ago – linked to the Noida violence? Snippets from the protest were shared by the official X handle of CPI(M), and the Delhi-based event was also covered by several media outlets.The 13-page police report repeatedly refers to “Marxist ideology” in a bid to establish a link between Marxism – a concept introduced by the 19th century German philosopher Karl Marx as he advocated for a classless society and wrote about capitalism creating a wedge between the bourgeoisie and proletariat – and the workers’ protest that later turned violent. From left, the CPI(M)’s post on the pro-Palestine meeting, a news report on the protest, and a tweet from The Chronology which has been reproduced verbatim in the Noida Police’s annexure 3 on the NSA against Satyam Verma.“Evidence has been found in connection with active involvement of Satyam Verma in this violent protest, who has had an initial background in Marxist ideology. Apart from this, Satyam Verma has been treasurer and coordinator at Lucknow’s Jan Chetna bookstore. Books published by this organization favour Marxist ideology and it is through these books that a cadre is inducted for the purpose of changing one’s thought process, and movements are built inside universities wherein instead of directly inciting for violence, the mindset is made so aggressive that an individual becomes violent,” the Noida Police has been quoted as saying in its report justifying the need to invoke NSA against Verma. Speaking to The Wire, Brinda Karat, senior leader of the CPI(M) and former Rajya Sabha MP, said: “This has been a trend noticed worldwide starting from the US President Donald Trump to the Noida Police, any form of dissidence or democratic dissent is linked with left-wing ideology and demonised. I would say that this is a badge of honour for us – that wherever there is a protest against injustice, those behind such injustices know that the left-wing will oppose it.”“NSA is a dangerous law in which bail is not granted easily and the onus regarding the burden of proof actually lies on the accused so in the middle of an ideological battle between right-wing ideology and left-wing, you cannot murder the Constitution of India. Now the police itself is using for [its] investigation tool a biased Twitter handle, which is known to be associated with right-wing ideology, what investigation have they [police] done?”, Karat further added.Member of the RWPI and contributor to Mazdoor Bigul speak outThe same playbook has also been followed in the treatment of Mazdoor Bigul, says a contributor.“It is important to clarify at the very outset that Mazdoor Bigul is not an organisation; it’s a newspaper to which different people contribute depending on what is the topical issue. These contributions, in the form of articles, are on a voluntary basis,” says Naureeen Sabba, a Delhi-based contributor who has been writing pieces for Mazdoor Bigul for the last three years. Sabba also looks after the day-to-day functioning of a public library in Delhi’s Shahbad area, which is largely inhabited by factory workers and domestic workers. She also runs night schools and organises medical camps for workers. “The police theory is nothing but a fabrication. Mazdoor Bigul is a registered newspaper, so by that logic if we were indeed doing something illegal through the newspaper, why were the police unaware of it until now? They are now linking programmes that were held in the public domain to some sort of conspiracy,” Sabba told The Wire. According to Sabba, Mazdoor Bigul is published from Lucknow, with the number of copies largely depending on subscriber demand. Subscription plans, she said, range from one month to a lifetime and are publicly available. Among the themes Naureen has written about recently include how Bollywood has been flooded with propaganda movies and wastage of public exchequer money due to frequent adjournments in the last parliament session. When asked about how journalist Satyam Verma was associated with the Mazdoor Bigul newspaper, Sabba, while speaking to The Wire on phone, told this reporter, “He was neither an editor nor a founder but would contribute occasionally through his pieces. At times he [Verma] would help with proof-reading and translating some English stories to Hindi which were well-written.”Speaking to The Wire, Yogesh Swamy, one of the founding members of the Revolutionary Workers Party of India said, “RWPI was founded in 2018 by some like-minded persons who were associated with issues related to labourers. We believe that a like-minded government which is sensitive towards issues related to a large majority of the population comprising workers should come to power. And in order to join the political process, we have been trying to get the party registered with the Election Commission as well.”How was Satyam Verma associated with RWPI?Responding to this question, Swamy, a journalism graduate who said he once got help from Verma while applying for an internship at Amar Ujala in Delhi, told The Wire, “There was no interaction with Verma as such. Even if I had to contribute an article for Mazdoor Bigul, I would do that from Delhi itself. It was only on March 22, 2026 when he had come to Delhi to attend a public function related to the inauguration of a library in Karawal Nagar on the occasion of the birth anniversary of Shaheed Bhagat Singh, which was in fact attended by other intellectuals, writers and journalists across the country.”When asked whether RWPI played any active role in the June 2024 pro-Palestine protest, Swamy told this reporter, “No such programme was ever organised by RWPI, I can recall 100% that no such event was held by us where we invited [the late] Sitaram Yechury and others. Yes, when issue-based protests are organised, members of different groups do come together.” According to People’s Democracy, a newspaper by CPI(M), in June 2024, a call for the protest in solidarity with Palestine, had been given by Pragatisheel Mahila Sangathan, SFI, AISA, CITU among other left wing organisations. There was no mention of RWPI. This was a claim falsely made by the right-wing handle The Chronology, and seemingly accepted and regurgitated by the Noida Police. This reporter contacted Noida Police Commissioner Laxmi Singh, but the phone calls went unanswered. The Wire has sent a questionnaire to the Commissioner’s official email ID. This story will be updated as and when a response is received.