“Zinda kaumein paanch saal tak intezaar nahin karti”, Ram Manohar Lohia said it decades ago, and he meant it as a challenge to power: a people with life in them do not sit quietly between one election and the next, waiting for a ballot to fix what is broken. They speak up. They gather. They protest. And that right is not a favour the powerful hand down. It is written into the Constitution. Article 19 gives every Indian, student, farmer, aspirant alike the right to assemble peacefully and speak their mind. And the rule that flows from it is simple: when a crowd is peaceful, the police have no business raising a baton at all. Force is the last resort when a crowd actually turns violent — never the first answer to questions that are often awkward to people in power.
From Ranchi to Jantar Mantar, the state seems to have forgotten every word of that.
Yesterday in Ranchi, JPSC-JSSC aspirants marched on the Jharkhand Assembly with one demand — a CBI probe into the recruitment scandal that has wrecked their careers. Their leaders said, over and over, that the march would be peaceful and constitutional. The state’s reply came in three parts: water cannon, then lathis, then tear gas.
If that sounds like a rerun, it is. On July 20, tens of thousands marched from Jantar Mantar towards Parliament under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party — the “Gen-Z movement”, largely led by youth of the nation, born of the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak, a scandal already linked to a string of student suicides. They too got tear gas and batons. Women protesters were assaulted by senior cops on camera; teens were hauled into police vans with blood streaming down their faces.
Two cities, same script — and afterwards, the same silence. Not one police officer, in either place, has been named, suspended, or charged. It is just students who are being beaten, cornered, booked and subjected to “law”, which by the Constitution is the same for both the protester and the police.
Here, the police tell one story and the protesters another. The police say the crowds defied prohibitory orders, broke through barricades and, in Delhi, pelted stones, and they put their own injured at more than a hundred. The protesters say the marches were peaceful, and that much of the violence came from unidentified men in plainclothes — not from them. Both versions are now before the courts. But here is the point that survives whichever one you believe: even when an assembly is unlawful, the way you break it up is bound by law.
So what are the police actually allowed to do? Section 148 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, which replaced the old CrPC Section 129, lets an officer order a crowd to disperse and, if it refuses, use force to scatter it. But force to disperse is not a licence to injure. The principle is older than the Republic and simple: use no more force than the moment demands, never use it to punish, and stop the instant the crowd breaks up. And the law is even blunter about the graver step. When armed force is called in under Section 149, the statute spells out the limit in words— minimum necessary force and the least possible injury to person and property.
Consider what proportionate policing would have looked like. Even a crowd determined to march on the Assembly or Parliament can be managed without a baton charge: let them march, halt them at the barricade line, and take a representative inside to put their case to the minister. That option was available. It is the ordinary, lawful way to contain a protest— and its very availability is what condemns what happened instead. Because the law does not ask whether an assembly was unlawful. It asks whether the force used to break it up was proportionate. Grant the government its worst-case account— every defied order, every barricade, every stone— and the police still fail that test.
The Supreme Court has already drawn this line. In the Ramlila Maidan Incident (2012), it held that any force used to enforce a restriction on protest must be proportionate to the actual threat, and that the state has a positive duty to help peaceful assembly along, not merely put up with it. Four years later, in Anita Thakur v. State of J&K (2016), it went to the exact scenario on the streets today: even where a crowd causes some provocation, the police’s use of force becomes excessive and unlawful the moment the situation is under control — and when it does, it violates fundamental rights. The Court held the state to account and ordered compensation. This is binding law, not commentary.
Against this, the state has two shields, and both leak. A prohibitory order under Section 163 BNSS can make an assembly unlawful, but it does not authorise cracking open the heads of those who defy it. And Section 151 protects only officers acting “in good faith,” which does not stretch to cover excess. A constable who beats a detained, bleeding teenager is not acting in good faith; the moment his force turns disproportionate, the statute’s protection falls away.
Then there is the detail that should chill every citizen. Petitions before the Supreme Court and the Delhi High Court allege that men in plainclothes — unbadged, unidentified — assaulted protesters on July 20 while uniformed police looked on. An unidentifiable attacker is an unaccountable one: you cannot file a complaint against a man with no name. That is impunity, built in before the first blow lands.
And still, not one officer has faced a single consequence. Even the Supreme Court, hearing petitions on the crackdown, reminded the Delhi Police that peaceful protest is a constitutional right and that agitation alone cannot justify a lathicharge. Yet responsibility remains unfixed. We know the arithmetic by now: a student leaves with a fractured skull, the officer who swung the baton with, at worst, a transfer. Bleeding students on one side of the ledger; a change of address on the other. That is not accountability. It is a system protecting its own.
None of this is new — least of all the contempt for the young when they dare to protest. In 1974, a students’ agitation at Patna University grew, under Jayaprakash Narayan, into the movement for Sampoorna Kranti that shook the Republic and toppled a government. “My interest is not in the capture of power, but in the control of power by the people,” JP said, putting the young at the very heart of the protest, calling students the conscience of the nation.
So put the question where it belongs — to the minister who stays seated, the brass that shields its own, and the rest of us who look away. If a young Indian can be bloodied for asking what the Constitution guarantees, and no one in uniform is ever made to answer — what, exactly, is left of the right to protest in this country?