The first thing to fix is the vocabulary, because the police station version and the legal position use the same words differently. Ask whether attendance was voluntary and, if you could not leave, which legal power was used. Arrest carries specific safeguards. The BNSS also contains limited preventive powers, including Sections 170 and 172, so every overnight detention cannot be classified by a simple voluntary-or-arrest rule. An officer cannot justify confinement merely by calling it questioning.
What the power to call you in actually is
The Sanhita lets an investigating officer require the attendance of a person who appears to be acquainted with the facts of a case, but it requires that requirement to be made by an order in writing, and it limits it to persons within his own or an adjoining police station's limits. There are protective provisos as well: a male below fifteen or above sixty, a woman, a person with a mental or physical disability, and a person with an acute illness cannot be required to attend at any place other than where that person resides, though they may be permitted to attend the station if willing. A telephone call at nine at night that keeps you until dawn is not an exercise of that power. Our note on the police notice to appear and what it obliges you to do sets out the paperwork that ought to exist.
What an arrest triggers
If it was an arrest, a chain of duties started running. For an offence punishable with up to seven years the officer can arrest only if he has reason to believe the person committed it and is satisfied that arrest is necessary for one of five listed reasons, and he has to record those reasons in writing. The Sanhita goes further and requires him to record reasons in writing even for not arresting. The officer must wear clear identification, prepare a memorandum of arrest attested by a family member or a respectable person of the locality and countersigned by the arrested person, and tell the person that he has a right to have a relative or friend informed. The information about the arrest and the place of custody has to be given to that nominated person and to the designated police officer in the district, and an entry made in a station book. The arrested person has to be told of the grounds forthwith, and produced before a magistrate within twenty four hours excluding travel time.
Every one of those duties generates a document: an arrest memo with a time on it, a station diary entry, a name in an intimation register, a signature. If the police say you were never arrested, none of those documents exist, which is exactly what makes an unrecorded overnight detention hard to defend.
What the law calls it if it was not an arrest
Keeping a person confined without lawful authority can amount to wrongful confinement under the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, 2023, punishable with imprisonment of up to one year, or a fine of up to five thousand rupees, or both, with steeper punishment where the confinement runs to three days or ten days. A public servant who knowingly disobeys a direction of the law as to how he is to conduct himself, intending or knowing it likely that he will cause injury, commits a separate offence. Neither gives you anything in itself. They matter because they change the character of the conversation.
What to do next
- Write the timeline the same day. Times, names, ranks, the room, the vehicle, who else saw you go in and come out. Memory degrades fast and the case is made of times.
- Preserve the electronic trace. Call logs, location history, messages you sent from inside, the last outgoing call before your phone was taken. These are what corroborate a timeline nobody wrote down.
- Send a written representation. To the jurisdictional Deputy Commissioner of Police or Superintendent of Police, by email and by registered post, setting out the facts and asking what case number you were held in connection with. The reply, or the silence, becomes part of the record.
- Find out whether a case exists. If there is a crime number, you are entitled to know it, and the answer changes what you should do next.
- Take advice before you escalate. Where an arrest is likely to follow, anticipatory bail may matter more than a complaint, and our note on the remedies available when you are falsely accused sets out the sequence.
Where it goes if the person is still inside
A complaint after the event is a slow remedy. A person still in custody is a different problem, and the fast route is a habeas corpus petition to the High Court of Karnataka, which our guide on habeas corpus against an arrest and remand explains. That petition can be filed by a family member, and its whole strength lies in dates and times that were recorded contemporaneously. What ruins these cases is a delay of weeks followed by a reconstruction from memory.
One caution worth stating plainly. An irregular detention does not by itself end the criminal case that may follow it, and it is not a defence to the allegation. What it does is give you a separate grievance, affect bail, and expose the officer. Those are worth pursuing, but they are separate tracks and they move at different speeds.