Courts in Ahmedabad and the Surat District Court received emails on Saturday threatening to blow up their premises. Bomb detection and disposal squads searched both sets of buildings and found nothing. Ahmedabad Police said they were following routine procedure and that an investigation into the origin of the emails was under way.
The sharper reaction came from inside the buildings. Bhavesh Rabari, a member of the Bar Council of Gujarat, said the courts kept working through the threat. “Even after receiving the bomb threat mail, the police have not vacated the court premises, and work is continuing,” he said, adding that “the accused are not being caught and are directly targeting the justice system,” as reported by PTI and The News Mill. One of the messages carried the line “Court on alert.”
A familiar script
Gujarat has been receiving these emails for well over a year. On 16 February this year, more than 30 schools across Ahmedabad and Vadodara got messages warning of blasts. Campuses emptied, parents drove to collect children, squads swept classrooms, and police found nothing at any of them. Deputy Chief Minister Harsh Sanghavi said separate teams had been formed to trace the senders, according to ETV Bharat. Similar emails had reached Ahmedabad schools weeks earlier, around Republic Day. DeshGujarat counted 31 schools that February morning and described the sequence as a continuing pattern rather than an isolated scare.
None of the public reporting on those incidents records an arrest. That is the part Rabari was pointing at. Emails routed through anonymising services and servers outside India are hard to trace, and a case that produces no accused produces no deterrent either.
The choice nobody wants to make on the spot
Saturday’s complaint exposes a decision that Gujarat has never settled in public. Evacuate a district court on every emailed threat and you hand whoever is sending them a switch that stops hearings, bail applications and remand proceedings for hours at a time. Ignore the threats and you are betting that the hundredth email is as empty as the ninety-ninth.
Most institutions have landed somewhere in between: search the building, keep it running, tell nobody much. That is a defensible operational call. It becomes a problem when the people inside the building learn about the threat from a news alert rather than from the registrar, which is roughly what the bar association described on Saturday.
Court complexes are also harder to clear than schools. A district court holds undertrials in lock-up, police escorts, litigants who have travelled from taluka towns for a single hearing, and record rooms that cannot be left unattended. Clearing one is not a fire drill.
What would change this
Two things would help, and neither is dramatic. The first is a written, published protocol for Gujarat’s court complexes setting out who receives a threat, who assesses it, who informs the bar, and what triggers a clearance rather than a search. Lawyers and litigants would then know what is happening to them while it happens.
The second is attribution. Cyber cells across several states, including Karnataka and Uttarakhand, dealt with the same category of threat on the same February day. Threats crossing state lines are a case for coordinated investigation rather than parallel local probes that each stall at the same anonymised mail server.
Until one of those changes, the pattern repeats: an email lands, a squad sweeps the building, hearings continue, and the file stays open with nobody named in it.
Sources: PTI via LatestLY, The News Mill, ETV Bharat, DeshGujarat
This report was written with AI assistance from the publicly reported sources linked here; each fact was cross-checked against at least two of them.