The hearings in the Kim Davy (a.k.a. Niels Holck) extradition case took place over ten days in May and June in the city court of Hillerød north of Copenhagen. The case is well-known in Denmark, but only one newspaper, Information, covered the hearings. One person from the Embassy of India was present, but there were no representatives from the Indian press. I missed the first two days, but I attended the following seven court sessions. Here are my takeaways from the hearings.

Kim Davy’s counsel was dr. jur. Jonas Christoffersen, who until 2020 was the director of the Danish Institute for Human Rights. Facing him were the prosecutors Anders Dyrvig Rechendorff and Thomas Østergaard Wienand from the Special Crime Unit.

Christoffersen argued that nothing substantially has changed to arrive at another decision. If anything, the rule of law in India is weaker today than a decade ago.

The prosecution focussed on a particular difference between then and now. In 2010, the defence counsel had argued that Davy’s life and well-being would be at risk if placed in Indian custody. Graphic testimonies and reports on police excesses and prison conditions drove home this argument.

This time around, Denmark and India have negotiated a longer and quite innovative diplomatic agreement under which Kim Davy will not be lodged in an Indian prison, but be detained in a “surrogate prison.” Thus, he will not be left at the mercy of fellow prisoners and prison staff. By placing him in “civil detention,” and by deputing a few Danish police officers to accompany him during his entire stay in India, the danger of mistreatment at the hands of the Indian police or fellow prisoners will be practically nullified, the prosecution argued.

The defence counsel did not consider this solution to secure Davy’s personal safety foolproof. How will it be possible to protect Kim Davy in his “surrogate prison,” in court, and in transit between the two? Party workers with an axe to grind, goondas, and unpredictable mobs will constitute a danger.

According to Davy, the police in West Bengal are hand-in-glove with the goondas. They constitute “one system,” he argued.

Christoffersen substantiated his point by presenting literature dealing with West Bengal as a party-state, where political groups vie for control more violently than elsewhere in India. He spent 20-25 minutes going through Ambar Kumar Ghosh and Niranjan Sahoo’s study, Understanding the Unique Nature of Political Violence in Bengal to make this point. However, the Ananda Marga hardly figured in this account of political violence.

Communists of various hues may well harbour a grudge against Davy, but they are no longer as powerful as they used to be. Davy and Christoffersen were aware of the changing constellation of power in the state. Consequently, they tried to shift the focus away from the CPM towards the BJP, but that still left the Margis as a politically marginal grouping in West Bengal.

Davy’s defence of Ananda Marga

During the hearings, several attempts were made to characterize the Ananda Marga as a movement and as a belief system to explain with whom Davy had been associating.

The defence counsel depicted Ananda Margis as a socially progressive, spiritual seekers working for the rural poor. To drive home this argument, Christoffersen showed parts of a longish video from 1992 in which, inter alia, an American Ananda Margi “magnetized” water for better irrigation, and an indigenous farmer experimented with roasted hibiscus as a substitute for coffee. The judge pointedly enquired about the relevance of this excursion into decentralized rural development to which Christoffersen replied that this provided the proper context for understanding the group.

Christoffersen also called the long-time Ananda Marga supporter and ideologue, Ron Logan, by video link. Logan knew Davy from the 1980s when they had met in India, and from the 1990s when they had worked together in eastern Russia trying to chart a passage from communism to people-oriented development. Logan portrayed Davy as an idealist, who was singularly effective in mobilizing people. He was never violent. The only weakness of his that Logan could think of, was Davy’s scanty knowledge of macro-economics.

The state counsels did not deny that the Margis may have done good things, but they refrained from long-winding refutations of the points raised by Christoffersen. This afforded the defence a relatively open playing field.

Thus, Christoffersen could refer to Helen Crovetto’s 2008 article Ananda Marga and the Use of Force in order to present the group as utopian revolutionaries, and not as totalitarians with a sinister violent bent. Crovetto’s article could be read differently, but the prosecution made no attempt to do so. The points made by the defence went mostly unchallenged.

This also meant that the defence counsel could skirt any reference to two things with which the Ananda Marga is closely associated in India at large: the Tandava skull-and-dagger ritual dance, and the possibly misplaced allegations that the Margis have engaged in “child lifting.”  Instead, the Ananda Marga was presented as any odd NGO.

Lapses versus conspiracy 

Davy and the British arms dealer Peter Bleach both claim that the ‘deep state’ in India gave their plane an “open window” to drop the weapons by seeing to it that Calcutta’s air force radar was temporarily switched off. This was done, they claim, because the Congress party and the CBI (or RAW) wanted the Ananda Marga to foster turmoil in West Bengal so that the centre could topple the communist state government.

In their rendering of events, Davy and Bleach were smaller players in this murky game orchestrated from Delhi, and even from London.  

The defence counsel rejoined this discussion by drawing attention to a report presented to the Lok Sabha on 7 May 1997. The report on the Purulia Arms Dropping, prepared by the Committee on Government Assurances, had then shaken the whole country. It enquired into the lapses on behalf of the state and found several gaps – some of which could be laid at the door of India’s Ministry of Defence – while others could be blamed on the Ministry of Home Affairs, and the Ministry of Civil Aviation. The report did not find it suspicious that the Indian Air Force had not monitored the plane en route from Banaras to Calcutta: The IAF was only responsible for monitoring flights near the border, flights with heads of state, foreign military flights, and PIA flights.

In court, both Bleach and Davy stated that they did not know about the “open window” at the time they made the captain of the plane diverge from the normal route to execute the arms drop. Because Purulia is not far from that route, this manoeuvre added only around 16 minutes to the flight time from Banaras to Calcutta. Even without a switched-off radar, the arms drop could have been successfully carried out, it would seem, but Bleach could not properly communicate with the Russian-speaking captain, and the arms failed to land at the Ananda Marga headquarters as planned.

Christoffersen aimed to lend support to the theory about the switched-off radar, but the report from the Committee on Government Assurances did not offer much help.

If the defence counsel could produce no clear evidence that an air force radar was intentionally switched off as part of a conspiracy involving the Indian deep state, other “lapses” by the Indian state (and by Davy and Bleach as well), may still give rise to theories of a grander conspiracy. Thus, the report did mention that the Ministry of Home Affairs had received information from British intelligence about a possible arms drop. It did convey this information to Bihar, where the arms drop was hypothesized to take place, but the centre failed to alert West Bengal in time.

Apparently, Delhi informed West Bengal about a possible illegal arms consignment in a letter sent by registered post!  

The Indian authorities got another chance to seize the plane when (apparently at Bleach’s insistence), they imprudently decided to fly back via India, even though the arms drop by then had made news all over the world. It was, the Lok Sabha report noted, “sheer luck” that the Civil Aviation authorities identified the plane shortly before it left India on its way from Madras back to Karachi. Even after the plane was ordered to land in Bombay, Davy managed to escape from the airport in what the report considers yet another security lapse.

Davy’s escape from Bombay airport and back to Denmark remains mysterious. Davy has long postulated that the ex-Congress politician Pappu Yadav played a key role in his escape after Bleach and the crew were arrested in Bombay. In June 2024, Pappu Yadav was re-elected from Bihar as an independent MP.  

To my knowledge, Davy did not repeat his allegation during the hearings. However, the Danish newspaper Information did sound out Christoffersen about Yadav. Christoffersen confirmed that Pappu Yadav was of concern for Davy’s safety. Should he be extradited, Davy maintained in court, the Congress Party would not want him to talk about the switched-off radar, and about his escape from India.

At the same time, Davy also alleged that the BJP will do everything to hold the Congress responsible for the switched-off radar. These entanglements could well prolong the court hearings in Kolkata beyond the twelve months which the present diplomatic agreement between India and Denmark visualizes as the maximum duration of Davy’s trial. If the case were to drag on for a longer period, or if it goes on appeal, this might create complications that the diplomatic agreement has not yet taken into account.

In a comparable case mentioned by Christoffersen in his final argument, a Danish citizen was extradited to stand trial in Rwanda. Though the person was found not guilty, he was not allowed to return to Denmark, because the case went on appeal leaving the person penniless in a legal vacuum.

All through the proceedings, the senior prosecutor Anders Dyrvig Rechendorff tried to focus narrowly on the case as an extradition case, leaving it to Christoffersen to consider the arms drop case in its entirety. Christoffersen, for his part, went into the details of the judgement handed down by the Calcutta court in 2000 against Bleach and the crew to ferret out implications for a future case against Davy.

Portions of the judgment were translated into Danish and discussed in detail.

The proceedings made it clear that the Calcutta judge had done a thorough job. Unwilling to cede such credibility to the Indian judiciary, Christoffersen paved this over and instead emphasized that the Calcutta court did not find Bleach guilty of waging war on India (IPC 121), but only of conspiring to do so (IPC 121A).

That, too, was a difficult decision to arrive at, because it has never been proved what exactly the weapons were to be used for, and who exactly among the Margis were to receive the weapons.

Conspiracy being difficult to prove and the Indian crime of “conspiracy” not having a clear equivalent in Danish law, Christoffersen argued that Davy can only be charged with illegal possession of arms, and not with terror, waging war, or conspiring to do so. A Danish court would award less than four years of prison for illegal arms possession. Since extradition requires a minimum of a four-year sentence, Davy should not be extradited at all, the defence counsel opined.

For his part, the prosecutor noticed that the Calcutta judge had gone to a great extent to clarify whether the CBI could have “planted” additional weapons to implicate Bleach, as Bleach has alleged. The judge had meticulously ruled out this possibility, fortifying the prosecutor’s belief in the effectiveness of Indian courts.

At the same time, it remained a moot point whether Davy knew exactly what weapons were on board. Davy had previous experience as a bank robber in Denmark as far back as 1982. And, as per his admission in his book De Kalder Mig Terrorist (The Call Me A Terrorist), he had led a gold smuggling operation from Hong Kong to supply Ananda Marga with cash, but he was not an arms dealer.

The weapons, as per Davy, were meant for “self-defence.” If powerful weapons, such as anti-tank RPG-7 rocket launchers, were on board, this was ascribed to the need to produce a credible end-user certificate falsely stating that the weapons were for the Bangladesh army.

The prosecution did not consider the massive presence of heavy weapons a happenstance technical slip. The MI5 had warned Bleach against involving himself too deeply in Davy’s schemes. By going to Bulgaria to take delivery of the arms consignment, and by being on the plane, Bleach went a step too far. When asked by the defence counsel, whether this was the big mistake of his life, Bleach replied in the affirmative. He remained on the plane because he was afraid that Davy would grow suspicious if he withdrew.

Peter Bleach appeared in the Hillerød court for a few hours only. Called to witness in the Eastern High Court in 2011, he spoke emotionally about prison conditions in Calcutta. Because Davy is not meant to be put in prison, he did not do so this time. Instead, to substantiate his claim that the British and Indian intelligence worked together in a way that left him as a pawn in a larger game, he pointed out that the CBI and the MI5 are long-standing partners. The MI5, he explained, grew out of pre-war Indian intelligence agencies. British India, in fact, was not a colony. It was part of the Raj with its own Viceroy.

“What you had were two huge bureaucracies that fell in love with each other,” he averred. Joined at the hips, they left Bleach exposed even though he had tried to follow the law, he maintained.

The final words in the hearing were given to Kim Davy. He made a passionate plea to the judge and others to recognize his innocence. He would defend his family against threats, but he would never do any harm to anybody. People should be true to their core values. Otherwise, they would be reduced to nothing, he said while holding back tears.

Davy found support for his stand in two of the best-known Danish personalities: NFS Grundtvig, the priest and poet and inspirator of the Danish cooperative movement, and Hal Koch, the articulate church historian, who formed Danish democratic opinion under and after the German occupation. To top it, Davy quoted Hannah Arendt, from her book Personal Responsibility under Dictatorship before stating that if he were to be extradited, he would appeal to the Danish authorities not to let Danish police officers accompany him to India because that would make him guilty of their death, should they be killed.

After this plea, the judge, Lise Troelsen, announced that she would pass her judgement in the case on 29 August at 1 PM.

What could be the possible verdict?

I am in doubt about what the judge will decide, and I am also not sure what Indian readers would conclude. But it seems likely to me that the judge will agree to the extradition of Davy under the present conditions. Technically, she may add new conditions (e.g. regarding the maximum duration of Davy’s stay in India) to the present fourteen conditions already agreed upon by Denmark and India, but that would considerably complicate matters.

It is, however, also possible that she will follow in the footsteps of the two earlier rulings and quash the extradition order, thereby giving Davy de facto immunity from prosecution in India.

The defence got ample time to make his case. He made no bones about his distrust of the Indian legal system. He is not alone in this. Indian courts are routinely criticized for delays caused by too many pending cases and by manipulations by lawyers, clients, and others. The Indian judiciary is also known for allowing the guilty to escape due punishment, i.e. impunity, in too many cases. Christoffersen was able to produce many reports and articles to substantiate this common perception, but in the case of Kim Davy, there is a remarkable role reversal.

While India has wanted to expedite the case and to make the suspected criminal face trial, it is the Danish authorities, including the police, that have delayed matters. And, it is the courts and the defence counsels that have prevented the case from being tried, thereby according to Davy impunity for years.

Christoffersen produced overwhelming evidence to show the deficiencies and decay of the Indian legal system, but he was not able to produce much evidence of this in this specific case. On the contrary, when going minutely through the chronology of the case, he found only a molehill of judicial and executive-diplomatic faults, rather than the mountain of incompetence and deceit that he had expected.

As regards Danish justice, he seemed to have no qualms that Danish courts and police had basically done nothing to apprehend Davy after India approached Denmark through its embassy and Interpol. It was only after the terror attacks in the USA on 11 September 2001 that Denmark passed a terror law in May 2002 allowing extradition of its citizens to non-EU countries. Until then, the Danish authorities had left Davy in peace even though they knew where he was – and even though India knew that Denmark knew where he was.

Frustrated in its attempts to pursue the legal track, the Government of India imposed major, but diffuse, sanctions on Denmark for several years. Denmark did not respond to this bullying in kind. Instead, the two slowly reopened the legal track, resulting in the diplomatic agreement now in place. Christoffersen considered this a mistake, and he did his best to cast aspersions on this attempt at creating international law by arguing that economic interests had brought it about.

The prosecution was more positive in its view of the Indian side. The law work done by the Indian side made good sense. Further, India had issued guarantees tailored to protect Davy. If he were to be harmed while in India, it would be catastrophic for India. Hence, India will do its best to live up to the agreement, the prosecution argued.

One of the prosecutors also said that the case concerns legal policy. He did not elaborate on this, but the prosecution did repeat a rhetorical question often raised in Denmark: “What would Danes want if an Indian were to drop weapons over Denmark? Would not Danes demand extradition?”

The likelihood of such an event is small, but it is conceivable that Indians in Denmark may commit major economic or other crimes in the future, and then seek a safe haven in India trusting the Government of India not to extradite them.

That is why governments sign extradition treaties and enter into diplomatic agreements even though, undoubtedly, wary of shaking the foreign hand.