New Delhi: When Shrey Gupta sat down at his laptop at 10 pm on July 21, he had a very straightforward objective. The 28-year-old software engineer, who works at an Ahmedabad startup, had woken up that morning to the violence that unfolded during the July 20 ‘Sansad Chalo’ march circulating across social media. Hundreds of clips had appeared online. Thousands more, he realised, were probably still sitting in the phones of the students and others who had recorded them.What worried Gupta, an Indian Institute of Science graduate who later studied at IIM Ahmedabad before founding a startup and eventually joining a company in the technology sector, was what would happen next. “People will delete the videos and photos and other recordings that are evidence of July 20, or misplace them,” Gupta said, “and I thought there must be a way.”“I just had the same realisation that all others have had over the last few days: that pata hai kuch nahi hoga – we know the students will not get justice – because no evidence of the forces’ attacks on them will survive,” he said.So later that morning, he decided to solve this problem. He announced on Instagram that he was building “a searchable structured database” of police officers and RAF personnel seen involved in assaulting peaceful protesters.He asked users to comment with photographs of individual officers and details of the incidents in which they were involved so that they could be added to the database.He expected little interest. “I thought maybe 15 people would like it,” he said over the phone from Ahmedabad.Shrey Gupta’s Instagram post from July 21, announcing the database he wanted to create of all incidents of violence by police and RAF during the July 20 student march to parliament. Ahmedabad Police made him delete it.Instead, several more did. Encouraged, he stayed up through the night building a website, The Unbadged. He named it after the men in uniform who were not wearing their regulation name badges while they lathi-charged, fired at or teargassed students marching peacefully to parliament.Four hours later, at around 2 am, The Unbadged was up and running, inviting people to anonymously upload original videos related to the march. Unlike Instagram or X, Gupta wanted his platform to preserve original files and their metadata, creating what he hopes could one day become an archive of evidence.“Documentation is very important,” he said. “Instagram and other social media matter, but those posts do not carry the metadata of the phone or location. For every specific instance of alleged violence, you will require as many videos as possible so that you can corroborate what happened.”He put out another reel announcing The Unbadged, announcing that it would be a record-keeper for July 20, with the tag line “A dark day for India”.By the following morning, the reel had gathered roughly 2,000 likes and tens of thousands of views. The website, too, was beginning to attract visitors.The submission requestReturning home from work at around 5:30 pm on July 22 – just a day later – Gupta opened Telegram on his phone to find someone asking if they could send a video to the archive. He responded: OK.Almost immediately, he says, his phone exploded. Messages began pouring in, carrying his photographs, his addresses and other personal details about him and his family members. Some messages warned that he had landed on the radar of members of the “online OSINT community”. Others threatened that they were “coming” for him. Relentless calls followed. Gupta answered one before disconnecting as the caller threatened him.“I never expected the kind of hate that I am getting,” he said. “The threats to me and my family.”The calls continued, but Gupta kept working on improving the website. It currently hosts a timeline of the protest with a rough representation of the areas in which protesters gathered and the routes they took to reach parliament as well as hotspots – where the police lathi-charge and beatings were concentrated.It has a separate section for visitors to submit evidence.Gupta was happy with how the site was coming along. He knew the effort to document the violence could be a roaring success, ultimately helping people get justice in law courts.The Unbadged‘s home page. The site has been named after the police and RAF officers who did not wear their name badges as required by law, while lathi-charging and teargassing students on July 20.The knock at the doorAround 10.30 pm on July 22, there was a knock at his apartment door. Four men in plainclothes were outside. “Am I under arrest?” Gupta asked them. “No,” came the reply. “Can I make a phone call?” “Yes.”Gupta says he turned to make the call. As he finished dialling, one of the men reached through the grill door, unlocked it from the inside and entered the apartment.“They grabbed me as if I was trying to run away,” he said. But by then, Gupta’s call had connected. “All I could do then was to shout for help, and I did.”His flatmate emerged from another room, Gupta said, but the men in plainclothes pushed him back inside. Gupta says he instinctively struggled for a moment before deciding against it.“I saw two ways this could go,” he said. “I could keep resisting and they drag me away. So I decided to cooperate.”He asked for his phone back. After a prolonged discussion among themselves, the men returned it on the condition that he would not record anything, Gupta said.Shortly after, two of Gupta’s colleagues reached his house. Gupta agreed to accompany them when the policemen told him that he would only be questioned and that his colleagues would be allowed to come too.At the first thana, Navrangpura Police Station in Ahmedabad, Gupta says, an officer told him they had been looking for him since the morning. “It is causing so much violence in Ahmedabad,” the officer allegedly told him. He found it odd that the police kept asking him why he thought he had been picked “of all the people who are protesting and sharing videos.” This went on for a while, until he left.Then another officer, Gupta recalled, entered the room and remarked that nobody was asking him to delete his posts. “I asked him, ‘If I don’t delete my social media posts, will I still [be allowed to] leave the thana?’” he says. The officer remained silent.Taking his cue, Gupta deleted the posts on Instagram. The police had checked his other devices too, and seen a demo of the web site he was building. But they never asked him to pull it down nor discussed it with him.When called, the police officer who takes calls at Navrangpura station passed the phone on to another officer who said there had been no such detention or interrogation and that “a local contact” should physically come to the station in order to seek further information. He then abruptly ended The Wire’s calls twice.The questioning continued at a second police station to which Gupta and his colleagues were driven by police. This was the Crime Branch at Gaekwad Haveli. There, the officers asked about his educational background, his salary, his addresses, his parents and extended family (even about what his uncle’s children did), his bank accounts and his social media profiles, Gupta said. They said he wouldn’t be allowed to leave unless he shared all of these details.For some reason, photographs of his online accounts were taken.Several hours later, one policeman started to fill up the paperwork, taking a rough sheet of paper and writing on it by hand. “He wrote a lot of things, and then he typed it all into his computers, on which I was told to sign,” Gupta said. He never got a copy of those papers.The document recorded his personal details and acknowledging that he had made – and subsequently deleted – the posts on Instagram. He was then allowed to leave.“The three things I want to emphasise,” he said, “are that I cooperated fully with the police, they completed their questioning, and they let me go with no complaint or charge.”The ordeal that began at 10 pm on July 22, ended the following afternoon, July 23.The Wire has sent an email questionnaire to the DCP (Ahmedabad) seeking information on whether the local police was preventing residents from supporting the Jantar Mantar protests in any way and if this was being done as official policy. A similar questionnaire has also been emailed to the Joint Commissioner of Police (Crime) located at Gaekwad Haveli.The police commissioner of Ahmedabad Anupam Singh Gahlaut did not respond to calls but he replied to a text message asking whether individuals who support the Jantar Mantar protests in Delhi were being detained by Ahmedabad Police. He replied: “Nobody detained in Ahmedabad.” A follow-up query has been sent to him and this story will be updated whenever an answer is received.Also read: Will the Judiciary Look the Other Way When There is a Brutal Attack on Peaceful Marchers?The future of The UnbadgedThe experience has not altered his plans for The Unbadged but it has left Gupta worried about the future of his two-day-old site. Since it went live, Gupta says it has received around 30 submissions, stored in an encrypted vault. But he has not yet watched them.“I am not emotionally ready,” he said. “ I understand that they might mostly be Instagram videos, but I know if I enter the vault, seeing them will get me more enraged.”For now, the archive remains his primary concern. Gupta says he built it because he feared the documentary record of the July 20 march would otherwise disappear before anyone had the chance to examine it.He now hopes enough people know about the project that it can survive independently of him. “If something happens to me,” he said, “I want someone else to carry this forward.”