Raining Lathees On The Future Of India

The Constitution gives every citizen the right to protest peacefully. In Delhi, the state has designated exactly one place for it: a stretch of pavement at Jantar Mantar, hemmed in by barricades, within walking distance of Parliament and safely out of its sight. What happens on that pavement tells us what the right is now worth. Consider who has been dragged off it in the last decade: Olympic medallists, decorated soldiers, and schoolchildren. In January 2023, some of India's most decorated wrestlers — Sakshi Malik, Vinesh Phogat, Bajrang Punia among them — sat down at Jantar Mantar and accused Brij Bhushan Sharan Singh, then president of the Wrestling Federation of India and a six-term MP of the ruling party, of sexually harassing junior wrestlers over several years. Delhi Police registered FIRs only in April, after months of protest and a nudge from the Supreme Court. On May 28, as the wrestlers set out towards the new Parliament building, the police did not ask them to leave. They were dragged off the road and detained — national champions, hauled away like contraband, in front of the cameras. On August 3 this year, a Rouse Avenue court acquitted Singh, holding that the prosecution had not proved its case beyond reasonable doubt. That verdict must be respected; it is also worth stating precisely what it means and does not mean. It closed a trial that ran 127 hearings over 1,133 days. It did not establish that the complaints were false, and the wrestlers' counsel has indicated an appeal. Nor does it retrospectively license what was done on the road on May 28, 2023. Whether or not the allegations could be proved three years later, the women were entitled to make them from a pavement the state had designated for exactly that purpose, without being manhandled. The strength of the case has nothing to do with the propriety of the policing, and one should not be used to excuse the other. Before the wrestlers came the veterans. The One Rank One Pension dharna of 2015 was the quietest agitation this country has seen; the men sat in ranks, and largely did not even raise slogans. On August 14, on the eve of Independence Day, Delhi Police moved to clear them from the site on grounds of security. They came with lathis. A photograph went around the country of an old soldier with his ribbons torn from his shirt. Among the men handled that way were gallantry award winners and soldiers who had left limbs on battlefields. The outrage was such that within days the Joint Commissioner of Police went to Jantar Mantar and apologised, on the Home Minister's own direction — an admission, if any were needed, that the force used had no justification. The veterans had already been sending their medals to Rashtrapati Bhavan, in the thousands, over several years, some with letters written in blood. The Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces never received their representatives. OROP was announced on September 5, 2015 and notified that November in a form the veterans called diluted; more than two thousand of them returned their medals again in protest, and two tried to burn theirs before television cameras. The Defence Minister's response was to call their conduct unlike that of a soldier, and to say they had been misguided. That sentence deserves to be remembered. Men who had spent their lives being shot at were told by a civilian minister that they were behaving unlike soldiers because they asked for their pensions. The serving officer watched all of it. What was unforgivable was that the Army's own leadership never once told the government, in the terms it deserved, that this was not done. Our police, eighty years after the British left, still conduct themselves as the colonial force they were trained to be — an instrument for managing subjects rather than protecting citizens. Then came the children. Paper leaks in this country are not a lapse; they are an industry, with lakhs changing hands and coaching institutions inside the trade. In May 2026 the NEET-UG medical entrance was cancelled outright after a leak and handed to the CBI. CBSE's on-screen marking collapsed at the same time, leaving lakhs of school-leavers with no reliable result. A generation that had staked everything on those examinations discovered that its future was a commodity. Some of them did not survive the discovery. Their parents are still living with that. The protest that followed took its name from the Chief Justice of India, who in May had described unemployed young people as cockroaches and parasites who attack the system through social media and litigation. Within days a movement had adopted the insult as its banner. The Cockroach Janta Party's first sit-in at Jantar Mantar was on 6 June, with police permission, with the national flag, with copies of the Constitution. The demand was narrow and constitutional: that the minister responsible for the examination system resign. Accountability is a small word. This government does not use it. What followed, over seven weeks, is a catalogue worth reading slowly. On June 20 the site's lights were switched off and access to food and drinking water was cut off to make the students leave. Sonam Wangchuk began a hunger strike on June 28; by the nineteenth day he had lost 9.1 kilograms and could not stand unaided. The Education Minister called the protesters a B-team of terrorists. On July 18 police carried Wangchuk off the pavement to hospital. On July 20, when thousands marched towards Parliament on the first day of the monsoon session, they met lathis and tear gas. Sixteen metro stations were shut. The Internet was shut around Parliament. Twenty companies of CRPF were flown in from Kolkata. More than a hundred injured protesters reached RML's emergency ward, some with head injuries, one in intensive care. Police denied using pellet guns, calling the reports completely false and misleading — until a Safdarjung medical report recorded pellet wounds and a police station's own general diary recorded the rounds fired. Policemen were photographed working in plain clothes. An Additional DCP was filmed slapping a woman protester; he was quietly moved off duty, not charged. When students went to court, the High Court declined an urgent hearing and told them not to drag it into this, and the Chief Justice told a petitioner not to waste the court's time and that he was not interested in the videos. The doors that opened were those of Gurdwara Bangla Sahib, where the injured and the gassed were carried in, treated and fed. It is worth asking why a langar hall did the work a constitutional court would not. Delhi Police say 118 of their personnel were hurt, that stones were thrown, that vehicles were overturned, and there is footage supporting parts of that account. Honesty requires stating it. It settles nothing. Between a crowd of unarmed nineteen-year-olds who lost their tempers and a state that answers with pellets, tear gas, a CRPF airlift and an internet shutdown, only one party is trained, paid and sworn to keep its head. That is the entire point of discipline. Nor is the police case improved by announcing afterwards that 2,873 men with criminal antecedents were present — a claim that conveniently arrives after the batons, and that no student can disprove. The minister resigned on July 25. An anti-paper-leak amendment was rushed through Parliament and cleared by the President on August 2, with the opposition protesting that the debate had been curtailed. The state deployed everything it had against its own children and still lost the argument. That is not a vindication of the crackdown; it is a measure of how unnecessary it was. And despite written assurances that non-violent protesters would not be pursued, cases have continued to be filed and students arrested. None of this is finally about one pavement. Nearly a lakh government schools have been closed. Thousands run with a single teacher, no electricity and no toilet. The midday meal is what it is. Private schooling has been priced beyond the reach of the poor. We are producing a generation that is uneducated or half-educated, and then filing FIRs against the half that noticed. A government that answers its children with lathis has already conceded the argument. It should think very hard about what it is teaching them. Lt.General Harwant Singh (Retd) is former Deputy Chief of Army Staff. Views expressed here are the writer's own.