A private research project, run by one person on their own time. It is not affiliated with any political party, organisation, newsroom or campaign, and speaks for nobody but itself.

The operator is not named here. This archive documents the conduct of police forces, and in that context publishing a single individual's name carries a risk that is not outweighed by what it would add. What can be checked without a name is checked: every claim carries its source, every change is retained in a version history, and the integrity checks run in the open on the editorial console. The underlying data is available on request.

Journalists and lawyers who need to establish who is behind this before citing it can write to evidence@whogavetheorder.in.

None. There is no funding, no grant and no donor. The archive is built and maintained on unpaid time.

That bears on capacity as much as on independence. This archive moves at the pace one unpaid person can file information requests and read the replies, which is why the gap list is long and why someone else filing a request is the single most useful contribution available.

Three commitments, chosen because each can be tested against the archive itself:

• No funder, party or organisation sees a record before it is published, or is told what is in one.
• Evidence that cuts against the project's own framing is published at the same prominence as evidence that supports it. The government response page exists for that reason.
• No claim is upgraded to VERIFIED because it is politically useful, or left at UNVERIFIED because it is politically awkward. A claim's state follows from the documents attached to it.

The archive is built on a fixed chain, and no page is allowed to skip a link in it:

Incident → Claim → Evidence → Source

and, in parallel:

Incident → Question → Authority → Evidence → Answer state

What that means in practice

• A source record is created first. Nothing can cite what does not exist.
• An evidence record points at that source and carries two written statements: what it establishes, and what it does not. Both are required.
• A claim may only be set to VERIFIED or CORROBORATED once evidence IDs are attached to it. The site's own integrity check flags any claim that breaks this, and that check is visible on the editorial console.
• A question moves out of UNANSWERED only when a document moves it, not when an inference becomes obvious.
• An office is never linked to an order automatically. Has authority and is evidenced to have authorised this action are separate fields, displayed separately.

Where this archive is weak

• It depends on documents that public offices are not obliged to release quickly, and on RTI timelines that outlast news cycles.
• Oral orders leave no paper. Where an order was given orally, the most this archive can establish may be who was present and what was logged.
• Submitted footage is often a copy of a copy, stripped of the metadata that would fix its time and place. Such material stays UNVERIFIED, sometimes permanently.

• A primary document beats a report of one. Where we hold only the report, the state is REPORTED and stays there.
• A document is checked against its issuing office or registry where that is possible. Where it is not, the record says so.
• Anonymous sources are used and recorded as anonymous. An anonymous account alone does not lift a claim past UNVERIFIED.
• We do not pay for evidence.
• We do not publish a contributor's identity unless they have ticked the box asking us to.

Every evidence record carries a Report an error link. When a record changes materially we log the change, its date and its reason, and the record shows that it was corrected.

The archive is kept in a version-controlled repository, so every change to every record is retained with its date and its reason. That repository is currently private, because it also holds the queue of documents this project is about to request and from which offices. The evidence data itself is available on request to anyone who wants to check the working: journalists, lawyers, researchers, or an office named in the archive. Write to evidence@whogavetheorder.in.

If we have something wrong, write to corrections@whogavetheorder.in with the record ID.

What this site does to you

Nothing runs in your browser. There are no cookies, no tracking scripts, no pixels, no fingerprinting and no advertising. No account is needed and none is offered. Nothing is written to your device.

There is no cookie banner because there are no cookies to consent to. A banner here would imply a kind of tracking that does not happen.

How visits are counted. Like every web server, the one serving this site records the requests it receives. Aggregate counts are read from those logs — how many people opened a page, which pages, what linked to them. That reading happens on the server after the fact. No script reports on you, nothing identifies you between visits, and no analytics company is given your data. This distinction is the whole point: counting how many people read a page is not the same as following a person around.

Two exceptions, both on the map page only. The incident map on the investigations page loads its mapping library from unpkg.com and its map tiles from CARTO. Those two companies therefore see your IP address and the fact that you loaded a map, in the same way any website that embeds a map does. No other page on this site makes a third-party request. If that matters to you, every other page works without it, and the map degrades to a plain list of locations.

Contributors

• Contact details are stored privately, are never published, and are never shared.
• A submission is not public. It becomes public only if it is verified, and only if the contributor gave permission to publish.
• Contributors may withdraw a submission at any point before publication, and may ask for it to be removed after publication.

People in the material

• Faces of protesters, detainees and bystanders are blurred on request, and by default where a person appears to be a minor or is visibly injured.
• Medical detail is not published without the consent of the person it concerns.
• Police personnel acting in a public capacity are treated as public actors. Their families are not.

Takedown

A takedown request may be sent to legal@whogavetheorder.in by anyone, including a public office. Every request gets a written reply. Where a request is well-founded, whether a privacy risk, a copyright claim from the creator, or a person at risk of harm, the material comes down and the record notes what was removed and why.

Where a request is not well-founded we refuse it in writing and log the request. An attempt to remove sourced material from a public archive is itself part of the record.

The point of an archive is that other people use it. Journalists, lawyers, researchers and other archives are welcome to take what is here.

• Records written by this project — the claims, the questions, the chain-of-command mapping, the two lines on each document saying what it establishes and what it does not — may be reused with attribution to this archive and a link back.
• Documents obtained from public offices, such as replies to information requests, court records and orders, are public records. This project claims no rights over them.
• Other people's work indexed under others are investigating belongs to whoever made it. Their terms govern, not ours. We link; we do not relicense.
• Material sent in by contributors is published only at the permission level the contributor gave, and is not available for onward relicensing by us.

If you want to reuse something and are unsure which of those it falls under, ask.

What this site is not

It is not legal advice, and it is not a substitute for a court record. Nothing here establishes liability. A claim marked VERIFIED means a primary document supports it, which is a statement about the document and not a finding against any person.