Demonstrators in Delhi, Kolkata, Patna, Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada, and other cities demand the release of workers and activists arrested after the 2026 Noida wage protests, citing allegations of custodial torture, fabricated evidence, and unlawful police action.
Mouli Sharma
New Delhi, 11 July 2026
Protests broke out across the country on Saturday as three months passed since a wave of wrongful mass arrests took place in Noida through the months of April and May, beginning with the live-streamed abduction of four activists from the Botanical Garden Metro Station on 11 April 2026.
After state-wide workers’ strikes resulted in a statutory wage revision in the neighbouring state of Haryana, thousands of workers, going up to as many as 45,000 as per some reports, mobilised and protested in UP’s industrial hub of Noida demanding wage revision, double payment for overtime, and dignity at the workplace.
A High Level Committee set-up by the UP government to look into their allegations on 13 April 2026 found them to be true, holding that employers and MNCs across the belt– including Kent, Motherson Group, Richa Global, Oppo, Samsung, and many more–along with the UP labour department had failed to revise wages since 2012. Instead of prosecuting these defaulting corporations or officials of the labour department though, the UP police began to violently suppress the agitation, registering 14 FIRs against protesting workers in quick succession, and none against the employers found guilty of extracting forced labour for nearly fourteen years.
Between unprovoked assaults of unarmed protesters, including women, infiltration of workers’ WhatsApp groups to send provocative messages, and conducting mass arrests in violation of legal safeguards, the UP police detained upwards of 1100 people across not only Noida but the entire country, even traveling as far as Tamil Nadu. 170 of these were uniquely named across the 14 FIRs, as per analysis by labour researcher Rakhi Sehgal.
In May, yet another FIR was registered as allegations of the UP police’s own conspiracy to concoct a conspiracy began to surface, with police complaints being registered against individuals running two Facebook pages and the YouTube account of Hindi-language news outlet Jansatta. The accounts (whose posts have since been removed) had reported a sting operation by the latter, revealing the roles of Sector 142 Police Station’s SI Beena and DCP Vijay Gupta’s driver Anil Kumar in infiltrating workers’ WhatsApp groups and sending incendiary messages. Transcripts of the sting operation were submitted to the Supreme Court on 17 May 2026 by the accused’s kin, who have also alleged and petitioned against custodial torture of workers and activists by the UP police.
But it all began on 11 April, with the on-camera abduction of four activists including three young women by the civil dressed male UP police officials, which took place at 7 PM, well after sunset–which is prohibited. Live-streamed by the women activists on Facebook, the videos were a desperate cry for help by Shrishti Gupta, Akriti Chaudhary, and Manisha Chauhan, who in the videos can be seen helpless against a large police force, in uniform and some in civilian clothing, abducting their male co-activist Rupesh Roy from within the security check area of the Botanical Garden metro station, without any warrant or charge. As the chronology of the videos proceeds, Shrishti Gupta’s phone is snatched by the men as they become progressively violent, and eventually all four are forced inside of police cars and taken into unlawful custody.
Outrage against the videos online, activists at the protest say, triggered the UP police to fabricate a story justifying the abductions post facto. Over the weeks that followed, police conducted several unwarranted raids, seizures and arrests as per Supreme Court advocates Zia Kabir Chaudhary and Kawalpreet Kaur, ransacking public libraries and private spaces, executing illegal abductions of lawyers and activists, and alleged theft of multiple devices bringing the count of incarcerations up to the sizable numbers of present.
As of 3 July 2026, four chargesheets have been filed, which a panel of activists, lawyers and political analysts stated were “full of lies and absurdities” in a press conference on 7 July 2026.
“The witch hunt yielded for the UP police the total arrests of eight activists till now–Akriti, Srishti, Manisha, Rupesh, Aditya, Himanshu, Satyam Verma, and Yogesh. All of them continue to remain unlawfully imprisoned as 11 FIRs have been slammed on each along with draconian National Security Act (NSA) on Akriti Chaudhary and Satyam Verma,” said a coalition of activists and citizens called the Campaign for the Release of Workers and Activists of Noida (CaRWAN), which gave the protest call for Saturday.
Beginning with Jantar Mantar Road in New Delhi in the late morning, where Ladakhi activist Sonam Wangchuk has been on indefinite hunger strike alongside students of the All India Students’ Association (AISA) since 28 June 2026 demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan as part of a larger civilian agitation against corruption in the country by satirical political outfit Cockroach Janta Party, protests against the continued incarceration of approximately 50 workers and eight activists in Noida are set to continue throughout the country.
Upcoming demonstrations have been announced outside the Academy of Fine Arts in Kolkata, West Bengal; NIT Ghat in Patna, Bihar; the RTC Complex in Vizag, Andhra Pradesh; and the Lenin Centre neighbourhood in Vijayawada, Andhra Pradesh throughout the evening of 11 July 2026 as well as various other locations in Pune, Maharashtra; Hyderabad, Telangana; and Kaithal, Haryana.
Mouli Sharma is an author and journalist from New Delhi. She has been featured in publications like The Mooknayak, GroundXero, Frontline, Maktoob Media, The Observer Post, The Leaflet, Nivarana, The Polis Project, Article 14, NewsClick, SabrangIndia, Think Global Health, etc.