Parliamentarians from five Opposition parties have written to Prime Minister Narendra Modi highlighting the inaction over a police raid on a lawyer representing victims of the Delhi riots and those accused of inciting the violence in February last year.

Eleven Rajya Sabha MPs, including CPM leader Elamaram Kareem, have signed the letter.

The letter says: “A Supreme Court lawyer, Mr Mehmood Pracha, who is representing a number of cases of communal violence and other cases involving members of the ruling party at the Centre, was subjected to search and seizure by a large group of armed police personnel of the special cell of Delhi police who barged into his office and conducted searches for over 12 hours. The purpose was to access computers, which had files of many of these sensitive cases.

“This sets a shocking precedent. If a lawyer is representing cases not to the liking of the government, has the police the right to raid the lawyer’s office and break a primary principle of justice which is the confidentiality between a lawyer and a client?”

Pracha’s firm Legal Axis is handling around 150 cases related to the riots in which 53 people were killed.

The police are investigating Pracha for allegedly coercing a witness to make a false statement — a claim the witness has denied. The police searched Pracha’s office on December 24, examined his email outbox and later charged him with obstructing their search.

The signatories include the CPM’s Bikash Ranjan Bhattacharyya, CPI’s Binoy Viswam, Congress’s Syed Nasir Hussain, Akhilesh Prasad Singh and Shaktisinh Gohil, DMK’s Tiruchi Siva, N.R. Elango, M. Shanmugam and P. Wilson, and the RJD’s Manoj Jha.