Fahim Arshad Mohammed Yusuf Ansari is 51 years old, has a wife and a daughter to provide for, and wants to drive an autorickshaw in Mumbai. As we know from court records, he has a three-wheeler licence, issued in January 2024. Since his 2019 release from prison, he has worked at a printing press in Byculla and delivered food for Zomato through the pandemic. What he does not have, and what the Bombay high court last month declined to direct the government to provide him, is a Police Clearance Certificate, without which the Public Service Vehicle badge required to ply a commercial autorickshaw cannot be issued.The division bench of Justices A. S. Gadkari and Ranjitsinha Raja Bhonsale on April 29 in Fahim Ansari v. State of Maharashtra did not dispute that the petitioner had been acquitted in 2010 of all charges arising out of the 26/11 Mumbai terror attacks, with the acquittal upheld by the Bombay high court in 2011 and confirmed by the Supreme Court in 2012. Nor did it dispute that he had served the full 10-year sentence given to him in the Rampur matter – most of it as an undertrial before his November 1, 2019, conviction. What the court did, instead, was take the police’s confidential note at face value, accept that the petitioner had been “providing ancillary logistical support” in the 26/11 conspiracy – a finding the prosecution failed to sustain through three tiers of judicial scrutiny – and conclude that “the possibility of the Petitioner indulging in the same or in similar activity cannot be ruled out”. The petition was dismissed. Fahim Ansari may, the bench helpfully clarified, take up “stationary jobs” or “private employment”.What an acquittal is supposed to meanThe most striking feature of the judgment is the casual disregard for what an acquittal does, in law. The Acting Public Prosecutor’s submission – recorded in paragraph 5.2 – was that the 26/11 acquittal “is based on the principle of ‘benefit of doubt’”, and is therefore, by implication, a lesser kind of acquittal. The court appears to have absorbed this proposition without resistance.Yet Indian criminal law has only ever known one kind of acquittal. Neither the Code of Criminal Procedure nor the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita recognises any distinction between “honourable” and “doubtful” acquittals. An acquittal is an acquittal. The presumption of innocence does not graduate from “tentative” to “absolute” depending on how many sleepless nights the prosecution caused the trial judge.The constitutional infirmity goes deeper. The right to carry on any trade is guaranteed by Article 19(1)(g); the right to livelihood is part of Article 21, as the Supreme Court held in Olga Tellis (1985). To deny a Police Clearance Certificate on the basis of allegations thrice defeated in court is to substitute the suspicions of the police for the verdict of the judiciary – a finding of guilt by executive fiat, dressed in the language of “precaution” and “intelligence reports”.The petitioner’s only undisturbed conviction is for cheating and forgery – offences of no conceivable relevance to fitness to ferry passengers. If the state’s “policy guidelines” permit adverse remarks on the strength of acquitted allegations, the policy is itself unconstitutional, and ought to have been read down rather than deferred to.The Rampur case and its unravelingFahim Ansari was prosecuted in connection with the attack on the CRPF group centre at Rampur on the night of December 31, 2007, which killed seven CRPF personnel and a civilian. The Additional Sessions Judge, while convicting four of the principal accused to death and another to life in November 2019, acquitted Fahim of the Indian Penal Code’s sections 121 and 121-A (waging war). He was convicted only under sections 420 and 467 of the IPC and the Arms Act – the substance of the case being that his photograph appeared on a forged passport.That edifice collapsed almost entirely on October 29, 2025, when a division bench of the Allahabad high court acquitted the principal accused – Mohammad Sharif, Sabauddin, Imran Shahjad, Mohammad. Farooq and Jang Bahadur Khan – of the charges of murder, conspiracy and waging war on which the death and life sentences had rested. The Court held that the prosecution had “miserably failed to prove the case … beyond reasonable doubt”, and that the “defect in investigation went to the root of the case”.If the Rampur prosecution against the alleged attackers was botched at the root, the inference drawn from Fahim Ansari’s peripheral conviction in the same flawed prosecution is no longer defensible. To deploy that conviction as the foundation for further restrictions on his livelihood is not “reasonable restriction” within Article 19(6); it is the laundering of a discredited prosecution into an instrument of permanent civic disability.A personal detour: Watching ShahidI first watched Hansal Mehta’s Shahid in 2013 as a young advocate not long out of the Bar exams. It tells the story of Shahid Azmi, the young Mumbai lawyer shot dead in his Kurla office in February 2010 – four gunmen, two bullets – while defending Fahim Ansari in the 26/11 trial. The closing frames tell us that Azmi’s client was acquitted three months later of all charges.I remember leaving that cinema with something like vindication. The system, lumbering and capricious as it was, had eventually got it right. The young advocate I was that evening walked out believing that this was a country in which an acquittal was an acquittal, and that the rest of Fahim Ansari’s life would belong to him.What no one in that cinema knew was that Fahim Ansari was at that very moment in Bareilly Central Jail, fighting another prosecution that would consume the next decade. He would walk out in 2019 aged forty-four, with a wife and a daughter who had grown up without him. The film had a final card. His life did not.The republic of suspicionIn Fahim Ansari’s case the punishment did not pause when one process formally ended in his favour. The Rampur case – registered against him in early 2008, before the Mumbai attacks even occurred – kept him in custody for another decade. The completion of that sentence in November 2019 yielded, in due course, the refusal of the documents he needs to drive an autorickshaw. The Bombay high court’s judgment is only the latest instalment of a punishment that began on 1 February 2008 and shows no obvious terminus.That this is a patterned experience, falling disproportionately on Muslim men, requires no elaborate proof. The acquitted in dozens of UAPA prosecutions return home to find that the government has many ways of refusing to take “no” for an answer: hostile police verification reports, anonymous “intelligence inputs” no court will permit them to test. The judgment in Fahim Ansari gives this informal architecture a kind of judicial blessing – telling the police that they may continue to treat acquitted men as guilty, provided they tender a sealed cover and gesture in the direction of national security.A man pronounced not guilty by the Supreme Court in a 26/11 prosecution; whose principal co-accused in the Rampur case have themselves now been acquitted by a sister high court for want of any worthwhile prosecution; who has completed every day of every sentence lawfully imposed on him – what is left for him to do to be permitted to drive an autorickshaw? On the logic of the impugned judgment, the answer is: nothing. There is no act of redemption, no period of good conduct, no judicial pronouncement that can ever lift the cloud. That is not a “reasonable restriction”. It is a sentence of civic death, imposed without trial.Shahid Azmi did not live to see his client acquitted. He did not live to see the system he had served correct itself. He certainly did not live to see that correction quietly undone, 16 years later, by the same high court whose 2011 judgment he had helped to make possible. The young advocate who watched the film in 2013 has had a long time, since, to revise his estimate of where in the journey of an Indian acquittal the punishment actually ends. The honest answer, on the evidence of this case, is that it does not.Arjun Sheoran is an advocate practising at the Punjab and Haryana high court. Views are personal.