Eerie calm to the violence of lathis: Walking through Delhi on October 9 and 10

On October 9, as the sun gently set over central Delhi, the city fell into an unusually quiet lull. It was the day before the protests demanding the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) and a rollback of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. If it weren’t so dystopian, it might have been called calm.The road leading to the protest site at Jantar Mantar had been barricaded at both ends. New surveillance cameras and loudspeakers were strapped to trees every few hundred metres. From the speakers, a woman’s voice, unhurried and polite, warned people not to join the next day’s demonstration. Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita was in force, she said. Gatherings of five or more, slogans, and protest symbols were prohibited. Then the message played again, and again, in a continuous loop.Closer to Jantar Mantar, a policeman stood over a labourer as he welded four rows of metal barricades into one, so that no protester could drag them apart.On October 9, new surveillance cameras and loudspeakers were strapped to trees and electric posts every few hundred metresMetal barricades were welded together so that protesters could not drag them apartJantar Mantar is not where the Prime Minister lives. It is not where Gyanesh Kumar lives or where the Election Commission sits. It is simply the place the government itself set aside for dissent.Over time, this site has become where India brings what it cannot take anywhere else. For anyone with a prayer, a petition, or a protest, all roads usually lead to Jantar Mantar.But, on the eve of this protest — no roads led to Jantar Mantar.Instead, the entire city was swarming with thousands of security personnel. Hundreds of trains were cancelled. The borders of the capital were sealed. More than 50 metro stations were shut, and the traffic that remained was watched closely. The internet was going to be suspended in central Delhi the next day. The Delhi police made it clear that they had not granted permission for the protest. The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) responded by saying they only informed the police.  “We’ve been brainwashed all these years to think that to protest against the government, we need their permission first. We need to step out of this mindset,” Saurav Das, CJP’s chief spokesperson, said two days before the protest. In the 24 hours before the protest, reports of detentions – of student activists and CJP volunteers – kept arriving from across the country.“Currently, it does not seem like it is a people versus Gyanesh Kumar protest,” said N Sai Balaji, former president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA). “It looks more like the government is protesting against the people.” If the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party was unhappy with the protest, Balaji said, it too had the right to counter-mobilise. “But instead, they’re mobilising the police. Why use a government institution instead of your own party workers?” he said. “This is unseen and unheard of. Thousands of police are out there just to say, ‘Gyanesh can’t go’?”Expecting to be detained, Balaji, AISA chief Neha Bora, and other student leaders split up and spent the night in undisclosed locations. “If it doesn’t deter them from detaining us, it will at least delay it,” he said.Most CJP leaders had been out of Delhi. Some began making their way back to the capital.Ratna Singh, the head of CJP’s legal cell, landed at Delhi airport by 7.30 pm on October 9. As she stepped off her flight, she said, three or four men in plain clothes photographed her. “Now they’re tailing me and our car as I go home,” she told me on her way home.Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das, and Ashutosh Ranka were due to land the next morning and head straight to the 10 am protest.Mehr Pasricha, head of CJP’s legal police division, had spent the days before the protest mobilising people across the city. She said the group expected a large crowd at Jantar Mantar if the protest was allowed to go ahead.“Apart from anger against the CEC, many things have converged for this moment. Women are angry about the rise in sexual violence across Delhi. There is a general trust deficit, combined with the success of the last protest,” she said.A cordoned off cityOn most Saturdays, the roads around Jantar Mantar slowly begin to wake up at the crack of dawn. Men sort the newspapers that have to be delivered. A small crowd gathers around the tea stalls. Safai karamcharis (sanitation workers) sweep away the previous day’s dust, and a few determined runners go by.On the morning of October 10, the area had become a police fortress. Newspapers were sorted but not allowed to be delivered. A few policemen had tea at the stalls, then quickly asked the vendors to shut down. Only the safai karamcharis carried on with their work.At one corner, rows of policemen lined up for instructions from a senior official. Turning to the men, he said, “Whether it is a male or female protester, push the women constables in front. Let them handle it first.”He then demonstrated how to use the lathi. “Don’t lift it too high, or it will show on social media. Use it like this, from the side.”He then congratulated them for doing their duty despite the “hate” and “anger” they were receiving from protesters. “Just remember, we must not get into any political arguments with anyone. Do not react. Even if they ask for your name plate, do not give them a reaction,” he said. “This is your moral duty.”On the morning of October 10, the area around Jantar Mantar had become a police fortressRitu Yadav, 26, and a male friend stood at the edge of the road, watching the policemen. “I asked my friend to bring me because the metro was shut,” she said. “I am here for the protest, but my friend is a BJP supporter, so he came for a run.”Ritu is studying to become a government teacher. “I am tired of this government and want things to change now,” she said.Down the road, six girls from Delhi University stood watching police barricade more corners of the road. “We left our rooms by 5 am so that we could cross the barricades,” said one of them.Some protesters arrived near the protest site early on the morning of October 10Dressed impeccably in a black suit, Prem Singhal, 62, got off a bike at the street corner and walked down the road. A public prosecutor at the Bombay High Court, he had reached Delhi a day before the protest.“I am here because my grandson told me that I am talking too much at home, and if I really care, I should go to the protest,” he said.Prem Singhal arrives at the protest siteAsked whether the SIR had angered him, Singhal said: “Yes, but it’s not just that. Like Ambedkar said, ‘We must be determined to defend our independence with the last drop of our blood.’ This is now about so much more — health, food, education, rights.”Angered by the sheer amount of khaki and yellow metal, he said he hoped the youth would “break down these barricades” as the day went on. “The chance to save democracy is now,” he said.Anger beyond SIRBy 10 am, CJP’s Ratna and Mehr Pasricha, and YouTuber Dhruv Rathee, had all been detained.AISA’s Balaji said their core group had not been surrounded by the police. “We’ve been laying low. We are used to this. We know how this goes. We will see how the day goes,” he said.As soon as Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das, and Ashutosh Ranka landed in Delhi, police personnel boarded their flight and led them away into detention.The streets remained deserted. Police began loading protesters onto buses even as the day began. Outside a Sikh temple just 700 metres from the protest site, nearly 300 protesters had taken shelter the previous night. According to reports, the temple authorities did not allow security forces to enter, so a bus waiting to detain them was stationed outside.Deepak Thackrey, 45, a banker, had reached Delhi from Maharashtra by train the previous night. He made his way toward the protest site with a backpack, and said that he had climbed into a seemingly empty bus and slept for a few hours. “Within a few hours, I was woken up by policemen and told to get out. Apparently it was a police bus,” he said.Asked whether he had come to demand Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation, Thackrey said it was no longer just about the SIR. “I want a dignified life. I want proper employment. I want corruption to end. I want education. I am unable to pay the fees for my daughter, who is in class 9,” he said.As we spoke, a police car and a truck full of Central Reserve Police Force personnel began approaching us. “See, they’re coming. I’m not scared of detention. I am living in detention at home. I am dying anyway. So I don’t care anymore,” he said.When the police reached, Deepak picked up his bag and made them chase him down the street. The personnel caught up quickly, held him by the back of his collar and dragged him into the bus. Deepak leaned out of the window, screaming “Bharat Mata Ki Jai” as the bus whizzed away.For Deepak, who had been thrown out of a police bus that morning, the day had come to a Kafkaesque full circle.A police officer named Sanjay Kumar dusted his hands on his trousers as he watched Deepak’s head bobbing out of the window, still shouting. “Why did you detain him,” I asked. “I don’t know ma’am. I don’t know what I’m doing,” he said. “Is it upsetting you to do this?” I asked. He shrugged his shoulders and walked away.Delhi police personnel at the barricadesManish Kumar, 22, had managed to evade that particular round of detentions. He too had taken a 15-hour train from Bihar to reach Delhi on the morning of the protest. “I told my family I’m going to Patna,” he said.Asked whether anger over SIR irregularities had brought him all the way to the capital, Manish said no. It was no longer just about elections. During the NEET protests, he had watched the revolution from home, through reels. “I could not believe they made him resign. So this time I came because it feels like people like me can finally ask for their rights,” he said. Manish was also “tired of hearing the BJP talk only about Hindu-Muslim, about India-Pakistan issues.” “Is there nothing beyond religion in their governance?” he asked.Because of the internet clampdown, he had not known the CJP leaders had been detained. He kept wondering where they were and why the protest hadn’t begun. “They’re not even letting us protest today. And chasing us like we’re dogs,” he said.Harshit Chauhan, a 20-year-old student in Delhi, said he was a first-time voter who had found his name struck off the voter list because of “some confusion of address.”“Aren’t governments supposed to want to add more people to the voter list? Here they’re just deleting,” said Harshit, who had also attended the NEET protests. He had arrived early at the protest area and managed to slip in, but had no internet to pay his cab driver. “He didn’t take money from me because he said I was fighting the good fight. But this time it’s looking difficult to even stand here.”Down the street, 52-year-old Dhinasur had climbed onto a small ledge, taken out his steel tiffin box and laid out his home-made lunch. From this vantage point, he watched the cat-and-mouse chase between police and protesters.Dhinasur lives in Delhi and works as a gardener, while his wife and three children are back in Uttar Pradesh. His two sons wrote the police exam twice. “Then the paper got leaked. They had worked so hard, and they have given up now,” he said, tears filling his eyes.“Okay, I was born poor. But in this country, even if I work hard, even if I make sure my children study, even if they write exams, there seems to be no way out of this rotten life. Why?” he said. Dhinasur had attended the anti-NEET protests as well. He escaped the lathi-charge but faced a lot of tear gas. The resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan sparked hope, so he came again.For him too, the protest was less about the SIR than about the sheer frustration of being treated poorly by the system. “I’m angry about corruption, I’m angry about the paper leak, I’m just angry and sick of it,” he said.Among the few who made it to central Delhi, anger at not being allowed to protest was louder than the demand for Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation.A violent turn By 1 pm, AISA had put out a call to change the protest site. “Dilli Haat becomes Jantar Mantar today,” Neha Bora, AISA president, announced on X.Almost immediately, security personnel, the media, and a few protesters began making their way to the Safdarjung flyover. Bora, advocate Prashant Bhushan, and CPI(ML) Liberation general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya, among others, made their way there too.Neha became the only leader of the protest who managed to step onto the streets. A reflection of AISA’s history of protest, mobilisation, and grassroots movements was on clear display as they managed to evade preventive police detention. As soon as the group crossed the flyover, security forces chased down Neha and her comrades, and violently detained them. Protesters tried to stop the buses carrying detainees by sitting in front of them, shouting slogans, and clinging to the sides. The situation quickly descended into aggression as the police's playbook on dispersing protesters was implemented on the streets. Protesters were dragged, beaten, and forcefully pushed into buses. Most officers were not wearing name tags. Male officers also pushed and dragged women protesters.A woman in a blue salwar, working alongside the police without a uniform, dragged protesters onto the bus by their pants.A 19-year-old SFI protester, sitting in front of a bus with her face covered, said she and her friends had come to the flyover after being prevented from protesting at Jantar Mantar. “But here, they’re thrashing people. They’re pinching and dragging us. There is absolutely no humanity in them,” she said.One protester began bleeding heavily inside a bus, but police neither let him off nor gave him any medical aid.Several reporters were shoved into buses despite showing their ID cards. Saurabh Sharma, a journalist with Reuters, held up his badge from inside a detention bus. “I showed them my press card, gave all my credentials, and they’re only hurling abuses at me,” he said.Activist Yogendra Yadav and social scientist Jean Drèze were also detained.Several lawyers were picked up as well. Supreme Court advocate Shadan Farasat was lifted off his feet, his shirt torn, and shoved into a bus.Another advocate, Trishnesh, argued with the police, but in vain. “The police should know him. He has represented Delhi Police in the past. It’s unbelievable!” he said. “This is entirely illegal. There’s no defence to what the police have done today.”“No breach of peace”As the sun set and the violence died down, protesters began to be released. Neha Bora walked out of the Maidan Garhi police station at around 6.45 pm.CJP’s Ratna was released from house arrest. Mehr Pasricha was fr