A team of Pune police conducted raids on Delhi University associate professor Hany Babu M.T’s residence without a search warrant for more than six hours in connection with the Bhima Koregaon violence case on Tuesday, September 10. Babu is a vocal anti-caste crusader.

Today Pune police entered our house at 6.30 in the morning. They said that @hanybabu (my husband) is involved in the Bhima Koregaon case and that for this, they could search the house without a search warrant. They searched for 6 hours, took 3 books, lap top, phone, hard disks

— jenny rowena (@jennyrowena) September 10, 2019

It is such a dangerous trend that police is entering common people’s homes, scaring and framing them in false cases. It is an abuse of power and should be condemned by everyone.

In the evening, Prof. Hany Babu MT issued a statement on Twitter regarding the police raid at his apartment and we are reproducing that statement here.

This is my statement regarding the police raid at my apartment this morning. @jennyrowena pic.twitter.com/aQBKoI38rp

— Hany Babu MT (@hany_babu) September 10, 2019

I am Hany Babu, residing with my family at Noida. I have been teaching at the English Department of the University of Delhi as an Associate Professor for close to a decade.

At 6:30 AM in the morning, 20 people knocked at my door, claiming that they belonged to the Pune Crime Branch. Five of them were in uniform, the rest were in civil clothes. I was told that they wanted to conduct a search of my residence. When I asked for a search warrant, I was told there was none and that this case doesn’t need one. Following this, I requested for some form of identification to be shown to me. An officer with the name Dr. Shivaji Pawar showed me his ID. After this, the officers entered my residence and looked through every room of my apartment. The search went on for six hours. They made me change the passwords of my social media accounts and my email accounts. They have complete access to my accounts now through the changed passwords and I no longer have access to these accounts.

I would like to state that as a teacher, my work is heavily dependent on what I’ve saved in my laptops and my external hard disks. It also contains the research work that I’ve been pursuing for years. This work is not something which can be duplicated in days. These are years of my hard work. I don’t understand how a government agency can seize my work without providing me the reasons for it, or the basis on which a search was conducted at my residence. They did not have a search warrant with them and they did not explain further as to why they don’t possess the same. While the search was ongoing, they also seized the phones of my wife and my daughter, barring us from communicating with our friends.

[irp]