People vs Police

ON THE NIGHT of 19 July, several buses of the Delhi Police, some of them carrying barricades, flanked Sansad Marg and Tolstoy Marg to the mouth of the Jantar Mantar Road, where the Cockroach Janta Party had been protesting for the past month. Several thousand people were present at the protest site, with more streaming in, many of them carrying food and water. The air reverberated with chants of “Jai Bhim,” “Inqilab Zindabad,” “Vande Mataram” and “Bharat Mata ki Jai,” as well as slogans calling for the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan—and a few asking for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to do so too.

Shortly after midnight, we saw a few men at one of the entry points to the protest site, near a security check post. One of them was perched on top of two parallel rows of police barricades, using a sledgehammer to knock out the metal rods connecting them. When people asked them what they were doing, and why, they said something about the prospect of a police crackdown but did not elaborate. It was unclear whether they were from the police or protesters taking matters into their own hands. A bystander tried to figure out a way to alert the CJP leadership on the main stage but soon gave up—not only were there too many people in the way, it seemed impossible to get a message across.

Besides the CJP itself, several other organisations, including the All India Students’ Association and the Students’ Federation of India, had put up encampments in the protest site, each surrounded by throngs of cadre and supporters. The prevailing sense of confusion, as well as paranoia over how the Modi government would react to the protest, portended what was to come the following day, when over fifty thousand people arrived to march to parliament, only to be met by wanton state violence.

Over several hours on 20 July, in locations across central Delhi, police and paramilitary personnel attacked the protesters—who were, for the most part, peaceful—with lathi charges and tear gas. More than a hundred people were hospitalised with various injuries, and around seventy were detained. Some of the detainees told us that they had been beaten during the hours they spent in the Parliament Street police station, before being released that evening. By then, a detachment of security forces had made their way into Jantar Mantar, beaten protesters and dismantled most of the encampments at the site. Most of them removed the name badges on their uniforms to avoid identification. Throughout the day, mobile internet services were disrupted in the area, making it difficult to connect, coordinate or share information.