This is the third article in The Wire’s series ‘The Forced Guilt Project’, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. Read the series: Part I | Part IINew Delhi: At the Patna district court, mornings unfold with a familiar rhythm. By 10:30 am, police vans line the premises, unloading new and old arrestees. Bound by a long rope, they are escorted to the court for their regular court productions, before being herded back into the vans and sent either to the police lockup or Patna’s Beur Central Jail. In the crowd, Ganesh Tiwari, a legal aid lawyer, can be seen carefully trailing only those led to the first floor, where the National Investigation Agency (NIA) courts are located.Quite often, those booked by the NIA come from far-away states. Many, especially those from the southern and eastern states, do not speak the local language. Their families, mostly impoverished, are unable to travel long distances or find adequate legal representation to fight what are usually long-drawn legal battles. With little choice, they leave it up to the court to appoint a lawyer. And that is when Tiwari enters the scene.Legal aid, a constitutionally guaranteed right, is provided to a person when they can’t afford their own legal representation. Tiwari is one of the senior empanelled legal aid lawyers in Patna’s district court and mainly handles cases of individuals booked under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA).Though Tiwari is appointed by the state, his role as a legal aid lawyer is to defend his clients. But to do this, he is most often found convincing his clients to accept their “guilt”. His logic: “The cases as it is drag on for long. So, I explain to them that they have an option to reduce this uncertainty. Guilty plea is their only option.”Speaking to The Wire, Tiwari claims that in close to six cases, all related to fake currency, he has assisted accused persons in drafting their guilty plea applications. The applications, he says, are sometimes made in “consultation” with the NIA officials.The NIA spokesperson, however, vehemently defends the agency and says that it has no role in the process, and that the decision to plead guilty is entirely that of the accused and is at the discretion of the court.Tiwari also takes pride in the “quick disposal” of his cases. “My cases don’t drag on. I ensure my cases are disposed of quicker,” he tells The Wire.While Tiwari boasts of expediting trials, the reality is that the defence thereby ensures the maximum possible conviction rate for the NIA, irrespective of his clients’ actual roles in the cases.As The Wire has reported in this series, what Tiwari does in Patna’s court is part of a broader trend spread across India. The reasons why lawyers choose to assist the guilty plea strategy, however, differ.§In Delhi, M.S. Khan is a well-known name in UAPA-related matters. His small office (or chamber, as lawyers’ offices are known), within the Patiala Court premises, is a busy space, with family members of those booked under the UAPA visiting him on a daily basis. A second-generation lawyer, Khan takes pride in the number of UAPA cases he handles. “I am practically representing an accused or two in almost all cases of UAPA, investigated by both the NIA and Delhi’s Special Cell,” he says. Khan may have the highest number of terror-related cases, but the number of cases where his clients opted for the guilty plea route is extremely high as well.“I do as my clients instruct me,” he says – though he seems very aware that his clients are not making a free choice. In the decade since guilty plea applications became a tactic, Khan says he has come to understand exactly how the agency “manipulates individuals” into submitting these pleas. “The NIA officials are one of the most common visitors at Tihar jail. Most of my clients have had NIA officials visiting them in jail and making an offer for a lesser sentence,” he claims.In response, the NIA spokesperson categorically denied that the NIA meets any accused person in jail to discuss a guilty plea. “Our officers don’t meet any accused person without a proper court order,” the agency’s spokesperson said.Delhi’s legal circle looks at Khan’s approach to UAPA cases critically. Many lawyers that The Wire met in Delhi accused Khan of acting like the NIA’s conduit. Khan is aware of this criticism. “It is easy to blame me, but one needs to understand that I am also one of those who has an equally high acquittal rate. [That is] something no one talks about,” he insists.In the process of studying the guilt plea cases, The Wire found that most accused persons are from other states. Terror crime investigations, by nature, are interstate, involving multiple accused persons. For many years since its inception in 2009, the NIA registered cases in New Delhi, the agency’s headquarters. This also meant that the accused persons were all moved to Delhi and lodged in Tihar jail, infamous for chronic overcrowding. According to the 2023 Prison Statistics India data, Delhi has the highest overcrowding rate, at 200.2%.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyTrials in NIA cases are notoriously slow. This, Khan points out, happens even when both the NIA law (Section 19) and the Code of Criminal Procedure (now the Bharat Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, or BNSS) (Section 309) mandate a speedy trial.There are just two designated special NIA courts in Delhi. They not only handle cases investigated by the NIA but also those handled by the Delhi Police Special Cell. Delhi alone has over 300 cases that have been investigated by the NIA and are pending trial right now. The chargesheets are bulky, and the agency, at the time of the investigation, usually collects testimonies from several witnesses, many corroborating a single allegation levelled against the accused. In all this, the chances of having day-to-day hearings, even though stipulated under law, is slim.In 2022, Khan along with a few other Delhi lawyers moved the high court seeking decongestion of the NIA courts. A favourable order was passed and non-UAPA cases were assigned to other courts. But did that change the situation? Khan says, “No.”§“The cases are only piling up and our clients get desperate,” says advocate Mohamed Sabah, who handles several terror-related cases in Kochi, Kerala. In many cases in which Sabah was engaged as a defence lawyer, his clients eventually opted for the guilty plea option – leaving him facing a “moral dilemma”. “When I take up these cases, I work out an elaborate legal strategy. But [when] the cases don’t move ahead, they [the defendants] are willing to take up any option that can set them free. Pleading guilty is their only way out,” he says.Sabah says once he has taken up the case, he stands by his clients. “I go by their instructions and argue for lesser punishment in the court. It doesn’t matter if I am convinced by their applications,” he adds. “What matters is if I am doing a sincere job.”Out of the 133 cases where the NIA courts have delivered a judgment (as per the data maintained on the NIA’s website from its inception until 30 September 2025), the agency managed a conviction in about 54 cases purely upon the accused pleading guilty before a full trial could be held or evidence led. That’s a total of 40.6% of cases – a figure much, much higher than the national average. Though there are no comprehensive statistics with which the NIA’s ‘stellar’ record can be readily compared – we have seen in Part 1 of this series the difference between ‘pleading guilty’ and ‘plea bargaining’ – a recent law ministry report cited National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) data to note that only a mere 0.11% of cases that went to trial in courts across India were disposed of through plea bargaining (pleading guilty in exchange for leniency in sentencing).However, it is the cases that go through the whole process that are the real test to study the NIA’s proficiency, says Alappuzha-based lawyer and former NIA public prosecutor S. Abdul Khader Kunju.Kunju says that even if the NIA secures convictions in lower courts, most do not withstand the scrutiny of higher courts. As an example, he points to the 2006 Kozhikode twin blast case. In 2022, identifying flaws in the investigation, the Kerala high court observed: “The investigators did not make a concerted effort to ‘go out in the sun’ to collect independent evidence of whatever version the accused told them, though we do not venture to speculate whether they employed ‘red pepper’ to elicit the disclosures. In their anxiety to wrap up the case, we say ‘anxiety’ since we do not think the officers of the NIA would be ignorant of the law on the subject, they even recorded the confessions made by the accused, clearly inadmissible under Sections 25 and 26 of the Evidence Act.” ‘Red pepper’ here is a metaphorical expression referring to coercive or harsh methods used by investigators to elicit confessions from the accused.Extrajudicial confessions, using coercive methods to push accused persons to plead guilty or even turn them into an “approver”, are some of the common practices that the NIA and its allied state-run anti-terror agencies are accused of adopting by lawyers, the arrested persons and their families.In 2019, a protected witness was brought to Mumbai’s NIA court to testify against two of his alleged former associates, tried for their alleged role in ISIS. This 2015 case was initially handled by the Maharashtra Anti-Terrorism Squad (ATS) and within months, handed over to the NIA.The witness, a young man, narrated in great detail his closeness with the other accused, Mohsin Sayyed and Rizwan Ahmed, and how the trio were influenced by ISIS and had left their homes in Mumbai’s Malvani. Initially, in his deposition, the witness supported the prosecution’s case, but when confronted with evidence by defence lawyer Abdul Wahab Khan, he broke down.He told the court about the torture he and his one-year-old daughter allegedly endured. In his deposition, he shared that in early 2016, he was called to the ATS’s Juhu office, where his daughter was undressed and made to sit on the burning bonnet of a car. “My daughter was made to sit on the bonnet of a car after removing her undergarments. She cried for two to three hours, but nobody helped her… I was told I would be encountered, and my children would soon end up in an orphanage,” his witness statement reads. The witness says he was also mercilessly beaten and told he would rot in jail for many years if he did not cooperate with the investigation. He was forced to sign printed documents that were later used as his statement against Sayyed and Ahmed, he alleged.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyUnable to bear the torture, the witness said in his testimony to the court that he was pushed to attempt suicide. He lay unconscious in a government hospital for days, and the ATS officers, fearing he would complain about the ill-treatment, stayed at the hospital with him, adding further pressure on him and his wife.Later, during his testimony before the special NIA court, the witness blamed the ATS for driving him to such an extreme step. His allegations were not against the NIA but the ATS, the agency that had earlier handled the investigation. But the NIA, an independent investigating agency that was now in charge of the case, didn’t take the matter up as they ought to have despite the fact that the offence alleged – that the ATS had sexually abused the accused person’s child – is mandatorily reportable under law and that the NIA as the investigating agency bore that legal responsibility. Instead of taking a view on this grave charge — saying it was unfounded or upholding it — they simply accused the defence lawyer of raising it in court as an attempt to “derail the trial”.The witness spoke of extreme brutality not only to himself but also to his toddler. Child rights lawyer Persis Sidhwa says undressing a child and torturing her was a clear case of a sexual offence, as defined under the Protection of Children from Sexual Offences (POCSO) Act, 2012. “Under the POCSO Act, it is mandatory for any person to report the crime as soon as they learn about it. The witness in this case informed the trial court about the alleged assault. The case ought to have been forwarded to the children’s court set up in every district under the Commissions For Protection Of Child Rights Act, 2005. Sexual intent cannot be determined prior to investigation and trial,” Sidhwa explains. Not just the POCSO law but the incident also attracts sections of the Juvenile Justice act and of the then Indian Penal Code (now Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita), she adds.Promptly after the witness’s deposition, advocate Abdul Wahab Khan moved an application demanding that the witness’s statement be forwarded to the POCSO court.NIA judge A.T. Wankhede, however, rejected the application, and accepted the NIA’s claim that it was a “tactic to delay trial”. Later Khan moved an appeal before the Bombay high court, which he withdrew in August this year. “Since Mohsin Sayyed and Rizwan Ahmed have pleaded guilty and I am no longer representing them, the application in the High Court no longer made sense. So, the application was withdrawn,” Khan told The Wire.The witness continues to live in Malvani, selling fruits from a street cart to make ends meet.Meanwhile, in 2021, after awaiting a verdict for over seven years, the two accused – Sayyed and Ahmed – pleaded guilty. The court sentenced them to eight years of rigorous imprisonment, of which the seven years already served in jail were marked off against their sentence.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyKhan, appointed to handle the case by Jamiat Ulema-i-Hind, a Mumbai-based NGO, withdrew when the accused chose to plead guilty. Since the NGO only takes up cases of those they believe are innocent and wrongly implicated, Khan stepped down. Eventually, A.R. Bukhari was appointed as a lawyer in the case to manage their guilty plea applications.Shahid Nadeem, a legal advisor with the NGO who oversees all cases handled by the organisation, told The Wire that his organisation considers it “ethically and morally wrong” to represent a guilty person in a terror case. “In many cases, we are fully aware that the person has opted to plead guilty as a last resort. But we can no longer be associated with a person once they make that choice. So, we withdraw,” he says. “Interestingly,” he adds, “once a person agrees to plead guilty, they swiftly find a lawyer to represent them.”Deeksha Dwivedi, a criminal lawyer in New Delhi, says pleading guilty in NIA cases is the buzz in Delhi courts. “The practice is so widespread and done so brazenly that one wonders if pleading guilty is the only way for the NIA to dispose of cases,” she says.Over time, Dwivedi has developed a standard approach. When her clients express a desire to plead guilty, she discusses the implications with them in detail. “The NIA recently approached one of my clients in Delhi. I spoke with both my client and his parents, explaining exactly what the NIA was trying to achieve. Ultimately, he decided against pleading guilty.”But this doesn’t happen in every case she takes up. In some cases, accused individuals, during their prolonged stay in jail, learn about the guilty plea option and make their own decisions. “In such cases, all I can do is ensure they aren’t coerced and that they don’t end up with a raw deal,” she says.Dwivedi emphasises that her loyalty remains exclusively with her clients. “My own standpoints on guilty pleas don’t matter when I’m aware of the harsh realities they face. They are the ones suffering extended incarceration, and their choices often amount to a last-resort bid to secure their freedom. But I make sure to explain everything to my clients, the possibility of maximum sentence, the associated stigma etc..”The growing trend of guilty pleas without full trials has placed lawyers in an untenable bind, torn between their ethical duty to defend clients and the harsh realities of an overburdened judiciary.The NIA, known to be a “premier anti-terror” agency, has increasingly veered towards extrajudicial confessions, accomplice testimonies and voluntary guilty pleas rather than evidence proving guilt beyond reasonable doubt. The irony is that the convictions the NIA boasts of rest on the word of the very “dreaded terrorists” that the agency was established to bring to justice.