The tear gas came before noon yesterday. By evening the Delhi Police were saying 118 of their personnel had been injured and around seventy protesters detained, FIRs for rioting were being registered, internet stood suspended in parts of the capital, and four Metro stations in the heart of Lutyens' Delhi were shut. All of this because a few thousand young people wanted to walk two kilometres, from Jantar Mantar to Parliament, on the day Parliament opened.
I have spent my working life in the Supreme Court. I want to write down, plainly and in my own name, what the law has to say about these four days, because I think the law is on the side of more people here than the barricades suggested.
Begin with a question nobody at the barricade asked out loud. Whose Parliament is it? The building the police were protecting yesterday opens its Constitution with the words We, the People of India. The students who marched are that people. Most of them cannot vote a minister out for another three years; between elections, the only instruments the Constitution gives them are speech, assembly and petition. The freedom to assemble existed before the Constitution wrote it down. Article 19 is a promise to protect it. So when the young walk to Parliament on the day it convenes, carrying their grievances about leaked papers and dead friends, they are performing the most parliamentary act available to people who do not sit inside the building. To be clear about what I am claiming. Nobody has a right to enter Parliament, and certainly none to attack it. Nobody in this march claimed any such right either. The plan, stated openly, was to walk up to the building and stop there. Hand over a petition. Turn around. A symbolic march. The police can hold a line at the precincts; no one disputes that. The dispute is about whether citizens can be lathi-charged for trying to reach the line. The Supreme Court has said as much for fifty years. Himat Lal K. Shah v. Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad, (1973) 1 SCC 227, held that the right to meet on public streets flows from the Constitution itself; the State may regulate it for public order, and may never leave it to the unguided discretion of an official. Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v. Union of India, (2018) 17 SCC 324, dealt with Jantar Mantar by name and kept it open for assembly. Even the prohibitory orders in force last week, issued under Section 163 of the BNSS, the old Section 144, carved out Jantar Mantar as the designated site. Read that again. The students were where the law itself sent them.
And what are they asking for? A national examination that is not for sale. Accountability at the National Testing Agency. Answers about the aspirants, more than twenty by the protesters' count, who died by suicide. Compensation for those families. Article 14 covers the first demand; the Supreme Court said in Sachin Kumar v. Delhi Subordinate Services Selection Board, (2021) 4 SCC 631, that recruitment through public examinations must command public confidence. Parliament covered it too, when it passed the Public Examinations (Prevention of Unfair Means) Act, 2024. As for the resignation demand, agree with it or not, the Constitution itself locates ministerial accountability in the House under Article 75(3). That demand is civics.
Now the mornings that brought us here. On 18 July, between seven and eight, police removed Sonam Wangchuk from Jantar Mantar on the twenty-first day of his hunger strike and took him to Safdarjung Hospital. The operation took minutes. Bedsheets were held up to screen it. Police also moved into the tents of the fasting students. His wife went to the Delhi High Court, which sat specially on a Sunday, and Justice Mini Pushkarna declined interim relief, reasoning that since Wangchuk had not admitted himself anywhere on his own, the government could act on medical advice. The matter comes up again on 24 July. I read the order with respect, and I share the concern for his health; so do the people who marched for him. But an interim order opens an inquiry rather than closing one, and the questions still on the table are the ones the Supreme Court put after the midnight action on a sleeping crowd at Ramlila Maidan, In re, (2012) 5 SCC 1. Was it necessary. Was it proportionate. Was there a gentler way. From his hospital bed Wangchuk sent out a handwritten note calling his removal illegal and this movement India's "second freedom movement". A court will decide the first claim. The second is rhetoric, and protecting rhetoric is precisely the work of Article 19(1)(a).
Yesterday was ugly, and I will not write as if the record points one way. Barricades were pushed. If 118 policemen were in fact hurt, that is serious, and whoever did it should face the ordinary criminal law as an individual. Still, one question comes before all the FIRs. Was force needed at all? This march was announced days in advance. Its organisers had committed to non-violence publicly, over and over. The man it marched for was in a hospital bed, asking his own supporters to stay peaceful. Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India, (2020) 3 SCC 637, says prohibitory orders are an emergency power, must answer a specific danger, and cannot be used to shut down grievance. There was an easy course available all morning. Agree a route. Fix a stopping point short of the precincts. Take the petition at the gate. By evening a delegation of these very protesters was sitting in a minister's drawing room; nothing about the day suggests that meeting could not have happened in the morning, before the tear gas. The CJP alleges the opposite ledger: Abhijeet Dipke says students' skulls were fractured, that a fifteen-year-old girl was beaten by a male officer, that Gitanjali Angmo was manhandled. The police call all of this false and say nobody was targeted. I was not at the barricade and I will not pretend to know. What I do know is the law. Ramlila Maidan cautions that the violence of a few does not strip the many of their assembly rights. Anita Thakur v. Government of Jammu & Kashmir, (2016) 15 SCC 525, requires force, where it is used at all, to be the minimum. And when two versions are this far apart, only one demand is honest, and it cuts both ways: an independent investigation into the injuries on each side, with medical records and CCTV preserved today, not after the footage cycle overwrites them.
For those detained, the checklist is thirty years old. D.K. Basu, (1997) 1 SCC 416. Arrest memo, information to family, medical examination, a lawyer. If any of the detained is under eighteen, the Juvenile Justice Act, 2015 takes over entirely, and a police station is the wrong building for that child. There is also a quieter case running through all this noise, a petition before the Delhi High Court about round-the-clock photography of the protesters at Jantar Mantar. The police say it is only for law and order. Puttaswamy, (2017) 10 SCC 1, will supply the test, legality, necessity, proportionality, and the Bench has already asked the pointed question: where is the standing procedure for policing this site that Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan contemplated? A camera parked on a peaceful assembly chills the very right being exercised. Every lawyer knows this. So does every protester who has felt a lens follow her.
Some doors did open yesterday. A delegation of the protesters spent the afternoon at Union Minister J.P. Nadda's residence and handed over a memorandum with three demands: release Wangchuk, seek the Education Minister's resignation, compensate the bereaved families. They came away, in their words, with no commitment, though the Minister called the talks cordial. Inside Parliament, both Houses were adjourned again and again, the Leader of the Opposition raised the lathi charge on the floor of the Rajya Sabha, and members walked out of the building to Jantar Mantar. Untidy, yes. It is also Article 75(3) starting to breathe, accountability moving off the street and into the House, which is where these students have been trying to send it from the first day. Wangchuk has named his conditions for ending a fast his doctors cannot want continued: let the youth leaders meet parliamentarians, or bring parliamentarians to his bedside, or let the government own the examination failures. The Constitution already contemplates every one of those things. Meet them. Hear them. Answer them in the House.
One last thing, and this part is for the students, from a lawyer old enough to be careless about saying it. A fair examination is your right. This protest is your right. Your life is worth more than either. The leaked papers were the system's failure; they measure nothing about you. Some of you are on that street carrying the memory of friends who did not survive this examination system. Honour them by staying. By finishing your fights alive. If the strain gets ahead of you or of someone in the tent next to yours, say so to somebody, today. Do not sit with it alone. Keep your voices loud and your bodies safe, and go home each night so you can come back each morning. You have done everything right so far, and I mean that as a lawyer's assessment, the coldest kind. You chose the designated site. You committed to non-violence in public, repeatedly. You sent a delegation the moment talks were offered. You went to the constitutional courts when you believed your rights were breached. At every point where this system handed you a lawful instrument, you picked it up and used it.
The measure of a constitutional democracy is how it receives its young when they walk to its Parliament carrying slogans, textbooks, and a fast. That receiving is still possible. The Session runs till August.
Author is an Advocate-on-Record and President of the Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association. Views are personal.