New Delhi: Parvez Parwaz spent several years fighting a relentless legal battle to seek the prosecution of Yogi Adityanath in connection with an alleged hate-speech case and his role in the 2007 Gorakhpur communal violence. Back then, Adityanath – the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) leader who today serves as the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh – was the member of parliament from Gorakhpur and the head of his own majoritarian militia outfit, the Hindu Yuva Vahini. For daring to take on Adityanath, who subsequently came to hold the ultimate executive power of India’s most politically dominant state in 2017, Parwaz paid a heavy personal price. He found himself embroiled in a succession of criminal cases and adverse situations, at least two of which led to his incarceration in a Gorakhpur jail. And it was behind those prison walls that he spent the final eight years of his life before passing away on Sunday, October 11, at the age of 72. According to reports, he had been battling multiple compounding health issues. V.K. Pandey, the superintendent of the Gorakhpur district jail, told The Indian Express that Parwaz complained of sudden breathing difficulties and was rushed to a hospital, where he breathed his last.Renowned for his dogged pursuit of justice against one of India’s most recognisable politicians, the journalist-turned-social activist was sentenced to life imprisonment after he and another person were convicted in a controversial gang-rape case in 2020. While Parwaz consistently maintained his innocence, his friends, colleagues and associates directly linked his conviction to a political vendetta, accusing the state administration of falsely implicating him.Circumstances took a sharp, downward turn for Parwaz after the BJP swept to power in the state in March 2017.The contentious gang-rape case was lodged – leading to Parwaz’s arrest – in 2018, mere months after the Allahabad high court upheld the Adityanath-led state government’s administrative decision to refuse sanction for prosecuting the chief minister over the 2007 communal violence case. The Supreme Court subsequently dismissed the appeals filed against the high court’s ruling.Parwaz was arrested in September 2018 after a woman in her 40s accused him and another individual, Mahmood alias Jumman Baba, of gang-raping her at gunpoint after luring her to an isolated location near the Pandeyhatta area of Gorakhpur under the false pretext of helping her resolve ongoing family disputes. The alleged incident had purportedly occurred on June 3. Parwaz’s colleagues pointed out at the time that the criminal case had been resurrected after initially being expunged. As reported by this journalist back then, the case was reopened after the alleged victim submitted a fresh application to the police. In the first information report (FIR) lodged at the Rajghat police station on June 4, 2018, the woman claimed she had come into contact with Mahmood – a local ascetic or baba – at a neighbourhood dargah (shrine) while seeking spiritual assistance to bring her estranged husband “under control” through ritualistic jhaad-phoonkh.In August 2018, just a month before he was arrested, Parwaz in a Facebook post said that the woman sold ‘halwa-parantha‘ at the dargah and was used to file a false case against Jumman amid an ongoing dispute over the management of the dargah. “I was simply implicated due to my connection with Jumman,” Parwaz said on August 2, 2018, the day he learnt that the district police chief had ordered a re-investigation into the case.A Gorakhpur sessions court convicted Parwaz and Jumman Baba in 2020, handing down sentences of life imprisonment. In May 2023, the Allahabad high court granted Parwaz bail in the gang rape case, observing that his sentence be kept in abeyance. However, hearings for his formal appeal against the conviction were repeatedly deferred, and Parwaz remained behind bars due to his entanglement in other ongoing criminal cases. French national Valentin Henault, who spent a month inside the Gorakhpur jail in 2023 after being arrested while participating in a peaceful protest led by Dalit women, recalled that he was cellmates with Parwaz. Henault has spoken publicly about Parwaz’s severely deteriorating physical health inside the prison. In 2024, Henault informed this reporter that Parwaz was steadily losing his eyesight. Also read: Jailed in India After Attending a Dalit March, French Director Valentin Hénault Releases a MemoirJust last week, reflecting on his time in the Gorakhpur prison, Henault published an Instagram reel discussing Parwaz. Henault noted that fellow inmates referred to Parwaz as “the Ghost,” and recounted that the aging activist struggled significantly even with basic physical tasks like eating and walking.Lucknow-based senior lawyer and civil rights activist Mohammad Shoaib issued a statement alleging – though without presenting concrete material evidence – that Parwaz’s death in custody appeared unnatural. Mohammad Shoaib’s statement, as seen by The Wire.Shoaib asserted that an independent investigative agency must conduct a thorough and impartial inquiry into the circumstances surrounding his death. Shoaib recalled that Parwaz’s unwavering opposition to Adityanath’s “communal actions since 2007” had made him a “constant target” of the BJP leader’s political ire.Parwaz had run tirelessly from pillar to post to secure the registration of a criminal case against Adityanath and other right-wing leaders for allegedly delivering inflammatory anti-Muslim speeches during a public gathering in January 2007. That meeting coincided with violent communal clashes that erupted in Gorakhpur and surrounding districts following the killing of a Hindu youth during a Muharram procession. According to the FIR – which was registered only after Parwaz successfully petitioned the Allahabad high court in September 2008 – Adityanath, then the sitting MP for the Gorakhpur Lok Sabha constituency, allegedly delivered a vitriolic speech calling for violent retaliation against the minority community. The FIR further alleged that shops, homes, and warehouses belonging to Muslims were subsequently looted and torched by right-wing elements affiliated with the Hindu Yuva Vahini and the BJP.Local police had initially refused to register an FIR, and the subsequent investigation was eventually transferred to the Crime Branch-Criminal Investigation Department.In May 2017, just two months after Adityanath assumed office as chief minister, the investigative agency submitted a final closure report in the matter. The state government formally denied the legal sanction required to prosecute Adityanath and his associates. Investigators argued that a video compact disc (CD) presented as primary evidence of the alleged “hate speech” had been tampered with.Parwaz filed a protest petition challenging the closure, but a local court in Gorakhpur rejected his plea in October 2022. In his protest petition, he argued that the investigating officer had filed the final report summarily without genuinely probing the core facts or addressing critical legal questions. The court ruled that because prosecution sanction had been officially denied under Section 196 of the Code of Criminal Procedure (CrPC) and the Supreme Court had previously dismissed his appeal (in August 2022), his protest petition was legally untenable.While still incarcerated, Parwaz filed a fresh petition before the Allahabad high court challenging the dismissal of his protest petition. However, Justice Dinesh Kumar Singh of the Allahabad high court not only dismissed the petition but also slapped a cost of Rs 1 lakh on Parwaz. In his order dated February 22, 2023, Justice Singh echoed the government counsel’s arguments, suggesting that Parwaz may have been propped up by “forces” hostile to Adityanath. Referring to Parwaz as a “busybody,” Justice Singh questioned how the activist had financed his long-running legal battle against Adityanath since 2007.“The petitioner must have been incurring huge expenses in engaging counsels to contest this case before the trial court, this court and the Supreme Court. There may be some force in the submission raised by Mr. Manish Goyal, learned Additional Advocate General that the petitioner is an impostor who has been set up by the forces, which are opposing Sri Yogi Adityanath, the present Chief Minister of the State of Uttar Pradesh, and the forces, which do not want progress of the state of Uttar Pradesh and India,” Justice Singh had remarked in his judgment.Subsequently, in 2024, a Gorakhpur court sentenced Parwaz to seven years in prison after finding him guilty of tarnishing the reputation of several public figures linked to the BJP – including Adityanath – by publicly accusing them of delivering inflammatory speeches that vitiated the city’s communal atmosphere in 2007. That FIR had been lodged upon a formal complaint filed by BJP leader Y.D. Singh, one of the original co-accused named by Parwaz in the alleged hate-speech case. The trial court concluded on the strength of a forensic investigation that the CD submitted by Parwaz as evidentiary proof against the BJP leaders had been tampered with.Parwaz was convicted under sections 467 and 469 of the Indian Penal Code. These offences are related to forgery of valuable security and forgery for the purpose of harming reputation.Omar Rashid is an independent journalist.