This is the fourth article in The Wire’s series ‘The Forced Guilt Project’, supported by the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting. Read the series: Part I | Part II | Part IIIBengaluru/Hyderabad: Obaid-ur-Rehman had already spent over six months in the Parappana Agrahara Central Prison in Bengaluru when multiple agencies, including the National Investigation Agency (NIA), began making sudden visits to him behind bars. Barely 21, and an undergraduate student at the time of his arrest in August 2012, Rehman was facing charges along with 12 others for his alleged involvement in the terror group Lashkar-e-Tayyabba (LeT) and for conspiring to kill right-wing activists in Bengaluru.While he was in jail, two bombs had exploded in Hyderabad’s Dilsukh Nagar on February 21, 2013, killing 18 persons and injuring over 100. The media, based purely on the NIA’s version, claimed that Rehman was among the “prime conspirators” in this attack, and had allegedly participated in the planning much before his arrest and continued later from inside jail. His face was flashed everywhere, and the media carried stories attributing a very specific role to him in the attack.Eventually, as the case progressed, Rehman’s name found no mention in the FIR or the subsequent chargesheet. His name disappeared from the media, just as dramatically as it had appeared. The articles and video reports that once condemned him, however, remain searchable online, available for anyone to find.Within no time, in March 2013, the agency pulled him in another case, this time for participating in a “larger conspiracy”. This new case no longer claimed he was a part of the LeT but another home-grown terror group, Indian Mujahideen – a name that first cropped up in 2008, following a series of terror blasts in Maharashtra and Gujarat.The larger conspiracy case was investigated by a team in the NIA’s headquarters in New Delhi, and within days, Rehman was moved to Delhi’s Tihar central prison. His first stint in Tihar jail lasted around 10 months, before he was sent back to Bengaluru. For the coming few years, the NIA kept moving him between Delhi and Bengaluru.In Delhi, Rehman was lodged at Tihar Jail No. 4, a prison where all accused booked under special laws like the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act (UAPA), and cases investigated by the NIA and the Delhi Police Special Cell used to then be imprisoned.In Tihar, Rehman quickly picked up the prison lingo. He also learned survival tactics: how to stay alive with minimal harm, avoid clashes with right-wing extremists, steer clear of the guards’ disfavour, and master subtle negotiation skills. But the single lesson that reshaped his trial was “katti“. The word has no fixed meaning in Hindi or any Indian language, yet it permeated Jail No. 4 so thoroughly that it even began appearing in official legal documents.Katti, he explains, meant a reduced sentence. “Gunah kabool karo aur saza katwa do (Accept the crime and get the sentence reduced).”Guilty pleas were gradually gaining acceptance at the time, though it remained limited to cases handled by the Delhi Police’s Special Cell. Established in 1986, the Cell was tasked with detecting, preventing and investigating terrorism and organised crime across the capital. It had single-handedly managed all terror cases in Delhi until 2009, when the NIA was formed. Later, the Special Cell began operating either in parallel or in tandem with the NIA.Rehman claims his otherwise bleak stay at Tihar jail gave him a concrete idea of how he could slowly break out of the “vicious jail circle” someday. “Plead guilty,” he says, “was the only answer.” But the case registered against him in Delhi was still in the initial stages, and he knew he would have to wait.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyThe real challenge now was to convince the NIA team in Bengaluru, as well as his co-defendants. “I spoke to two of my co-defendants in the Bengaluru case – Mohammad Akram and Shoaib Ahmed Mirza,” he says.Akram and Mirza, both 23 years old at the time of their arrests, had spent close to four years in Bengaluru’s Parappana Agrahara Central Prison by then. While Rehman was in Tihar, Akram and Mirza had already met many accused persons who would periodically get moved from Delhi to Bengaluru in connection with their pending cases. “We had a fair idea of the katti concept by that time,” Mirza, a master’s student of computer applications at the time of his arrest, says. “But before Rehman’s suggestions, we didn’t think of it as a possibility in our case,” Akram adds.Many of their co-defendants were not convinced and their families too fiercely opposed the idea. “This strategy would have won us our freedom but it also meant we had to plead guilty to the crime we were accused of,” says Mirza, a resident of Hubballi in Karnataka.Mirza was listed as Accused No. 1. His elder brother, Aijaz Ahmed Mirza, then 25, a junior scientist at the government-run Defence Research and Development Organisation (DRDO), was arrested alongside him. After six months in custody, the NIA decided to not name him in the chargesheet and Aijaz was released. No explanation was ever offered for why a promising young scientist had been detained without evidence. As feared, Aijaz lost his job.Along with Aijaz, two others – a Bengaluru- based journalist, and an electrician from North Karnataka – were released when the NIA did not file a chargesheet against them. No explanations were offered about their arrests either.Of the 13 who were chargesheeted, Akram and Mirza insist at least three, including Rehman, had no role whatsoever in the crime. Mirza recalls how his father, who worked with the Indian Railways at that time, was crestfallen on knowing about his decision. “He kept urging me to think over my decision. But what choice did I have?”Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyToday, the NIA is securing a conviction in more than 40% of its cases through the plead guilty route. But at that time “their (the NIA’s) immediate response to our proposal was a flat no”, Rehman says.A senior officer involved in the probe and wishes to stay anonymous told The Wire that the agency until that point had not viewed guilty pleas as a path to conviction. “The idea came from the accused,” he claimed. “We had to take the matter to our headquarters and also to the home ministry. The convincing was not easy,” he says.Akram recalls a meeting with NIA prosecutor Arjun Ambalapatta, who shot down their proposal. “Even if the agency offers leniency, I’ll push for life sentences for all,” Ambalapatta told them. Ambalapatta proposed that the NIA should push for a life term at least for a few named as prime accused in the case.But eventually the agency made a decision in favour of Rehman’s idea. “It was a slow process,” says Mirza. He further claims that the NIA officials would sometimes meet them at court or visit them in jail. “All of this had to be done quietly, without the knowledge of our families and also the lawyers,” Mirza alleges.After his stint in Bengaluru, Ambalapatta has been the NIA’s Special Public Prosecutor in Kerala, where he has handled at least a dozen ISIS- related cases in which the accused persons pleaded guilty.The Wire sent a detailed questionnaire to Amabalapatta; he declined to comment. “NIA has a strict media policy and only our (NIA’s) nodal officer can interact with media,” he wrote back, refusing to engage any further.Once in judicial custody, the investigating agency doesn’t get to contact an accused person without court orders. But there are no court records of the NIA having made a request to meet the accused persons in jail or the court ever granting it. The NIA’s spokesperson also told The Wire that the decision to plead guilty is entirely that of the accused persons and that the agency has no role in it. “When an accused person decides to plead guilty, the entire process is then only between him and the judge. The prosecution has no role in the process,” the spokesperson said. He also denied the allegation that NIA officials meet accused persons in jail. “That (jail visits) can only happen with the court’s order,” he said.Sometime in September 2016, Mirza says, all 13 of them sat together inside a jail cell and drafted their guilty pleas. “We looked up the charges against each one of us and plainly said we are guilty of the crime attributed to us and submitted it to the court,” Mirza shares. “The drafts were so identical that it felt like cheating in school exams,” he laughs.Until then, their lawyer, Hashmath Pasha, had no inkling of the plan brewing behind his back for weeks. Eighteen witnesses had already been examined; Pasha was certain of an acquittal, and so were Mirza and the others. “(Pasha) Sir had shredded the NIA’s case,” Mirza says. But there were close to 250 witnesses and their examination would have taken several more years.So when the application was moved, Mirza says their lawyer tried hard to convince them to withdraw their guilty pleas. “Pasha sir had put in a lot of effort and we were confident too that we would be released eventually. It felt like betraying him,” Mirza recalls. “We had no choice.”Once Pasha knew that the men had made up their minds, he decided to support them and negotiate for a lesser term. Eventually, all of them were sentenced to five years and released in September 2017.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyThough the Bengaluru case was actually the second NIA prosecution to secure a conviction through guilty pleas, the NIA soon began using it widely as a model across different parts of the country, especially in cases involving Muslims. The first case involved a Sri Lankan national sentenced to five years and eventually deported home. NIA officials privy to the investigations told The Wire that the plea deal stemmed from “diplomatic considerations”.Rehman, with his Delhi case still pending, was moved back to Tihar jail. “I pitched the guilty plea idea to the Delhi NIA team as well,” he says. They rejected it three times. “Each attempt, they countered with demands to implicate others. When I refused, they fought my application in court,” he alleges. In their broad response to The Wire, the NIA said it does not get involved in such discussions with undertrials.On the fourth try, the NIA relented, and the special court approved his guilty plea. After 11 years behind bars, Rehman walked free in 2023.Two years later, he fixates on one question: Why did the police go after him? And not just him, his four siblings were charged in separate cases during those years, only to be acquitted on all counts.His extended family has had a rough history with state agencies. In the police’s investigations into SIMI, his grand uncle Maulana Naseeruddin comes up often. Many of his uncles too have faced long incarceration for their alleged association with SIMI, a students’ organisation that was banned in 2001. “No matter our guilt or innocence, the state has branded our entire bloodline as criminals,” he says.Illustration: Pariplab ChakrabortyAkram, who was booked in another similar case in his hometown, Nanded, continued to face trial in the NIA court in Mumbai. Mirroring the Bengaluru strategy, when Akram moved a similar guilty plea application before the Mumbai court, the special NIA judge rejected it. “The reasons for moving the application to plead guilty were not clear and not disclosed,” the court observed. Akram was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment and eventually released on June 15, 2022. He has since returned to his fruit wholesale business.Akram and Mirza had hoped their guilty pleas would earn them goodwill with the NIA and other agencies. “They promised rehabilitation,” Mirza says. But the duo and also the others allege continuous harassment, not just by the NIA but also the state police.In May 2024, as a part of the investigations in the Bengaluru’s Rameshwaram Café blast case, both Akram and Mirza were hauled in for questioning. Mirza’s brother Aijaz too was called in for questioning. While Akram and Aijaz were let go in a few days, Mirza was arrested as the fifth accused in the case.The other four accused persons were named in the NIA chargesheet filed months later, but Mirza wasn’t. He was eventually released by the special court in August last year.This reporter asked Mirza what transpired between him and the NIA, and why the NIA let only him off without filing a chargesheet against him. He refused to comment on the matter.The Wire’s five-part investigative series shows that the NIA had increasingly found guilty pleas to be a perfect shortcut to convictions. Yet, this very shortcut has kept hundreds of young men locked up for far too long, leaving them with no real option but to say “I am guilty” in order to be able to walk out free. The agency celebrates its win record. But one question remains: When guilt is extracted in the shadows, using pressure and banking on broken spirits, who decides what justice means?