If you’re reading this, you already know something is broken. Not just at one protest site in Delhi, but in the way power meets ordinary people on the streets of this country.
I’m talking about the ongoing demonstrations at Jantar Mantar by the Cockroach Janta Party and the young people who have gathered there. What began as a sustained sit-in over education integrity, employment, and institutional accountability has turned into another chapter in a longer, uglier story: the routine use of force that feels less like crowd control and more like collective punishment.
Tear gas shells fired as a first response. Baton charges that leave people bloodied. Videos circulating of officers manhandling protesters, including women. One senior officer caught on camera slapping a woman during the march toward Parliament — an incident so clear that the officer was later removed from the site. Reports of injuries, detentions, internet restrictions in the vicinity, and unprovoked violence against the peaceful protesters.
None of this is new. What feels different is the growing sense that these tactics have become normalised. Using tear gas and batons whether the situation demands it or not. Treating dissent itself as not just a law-and-order emergency but treason against the Indian Nation. This should be treated as people’s democratic right that must be managed with restraint.
And it’s impossible to ignore the disturbing incidents that the social media showed policemen and their civilian henchmen indulged in aggression against young women and girls, their clothing being pulled, bystanders being slapped, use of deliberately obscene and degrading language, and batons used in ways that go beyond dispersal. These are serious transgressions of the law. They deserve thorough, independent investigation rather than partisan dismissal. The visual record of force — the videos of thrashing, the injuries, the disproportionate response — has damaged public trust once again.
Let me be plain. Police work is hard. Maintaining order when large numbers of people push against barricades is not a seminar exercise. Some protesters may have refused lawful directions. But that doesn’t justify a culture in which force is the default setting, and in which the line between necessary restraint and spectacle of domination keeps getting crossed.
Look at the pattern of the past decade and more. From university campuses to farmers’ marches, from citizenship protests to student agitations, the same toolkit keeps appearing: rapid deployment of tear gas, aggressive baton charges, use of supposedly less-lethal but deadly munitions, and a public posture that treats criticism of police action as anti-national. When accountability arrives, it is often limited — an officer transferred, a statement issued, a court hearing delayed. Structural questions are left untouched.
Such an institutional culture carries the DNA of a force designed more for control than for protection. The Indian police system, in its everyday practice, frequently operates as an instrument of the state first and a service to the citizen second. That inversion is the real problem.
Young people at Jantar Mantar are not abstract “elements.” They are students, job-seekers, citizens who believe the system is failing them on exams, employment, and fairness. When the response to their presence is clouds of tear gas and swinging batons, the message received is clear: your body is fair game when you challenge power. That message travels far beyond one protest site. It shapes how an entire generation understands the relationship between the citizen and the state. And we are seeing the consequences in the rest of the country. From Delhi it has spread like wildfire to Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal and even the Northeastern states.
Even after more than seven decades of independence the police in India remains a brute colonial force used by politicians to promote their vested interests. We keep hearing calls for “police reform.” The word has become almost empty. Committees are formed, reports are written, recommendations gather dust. Meanwhile the same culture reproduces itself. What is required is not incremental tinkering. What is required is a fundamental re-conception of what policing is for.
A force that sees its primary duty as protecting the rights and dignity of people — including those who are protesting — will behave differently from a force that sees its primary duty as protecting the convenience of the powerful. Training, recruitment, internal accountability, independent investigation of excesses, and genuine civilian oversight all matter. But the deeper shift is cultural and philosophical.
Imagine a policing system that treats the use of force as a last resort that must be justified, documented, and reviewed. Imagine officers who understand that a young woman at a protest is not an enemy to be subdued but a citizen whose safety they are sworn to protect. Imagine a system in which vulgar language, targeted humiliation, or sexualised aggression by men in uniform is treated as a career-ending offence rather than something that can be waved away as “heat of the moment.”
That system does not exist today at the scale we need. Building it will require political courage that has so far been in short supply. It will require pressure from civil society, from the courts, from the media, and from ordinary people who refuse to accept the current normal.
Some will say that talking about wholesale replacement is extreme. I understand the caution. Institutions cannot be dismantled overnight without creating a vacuum that worse actors can fill. But incrementalism has failed. The same patterns keep repeating because the underlying incentives and culture remain intact. Reform that leaves the core orientation unchanged is not reform; it is public relations.
We also need honesty about the other side of the ledger. Peaceful protest is a right. Violence by protesters is not. Infiltration by goons or political actors seeking to discredit a movement is a real danger and must be called out. But the burden of restraint is higher on those who carry the legal monopoly on force. When that monopoly is exercised carelessly or vindictively, the legitimacy of the entire system erodes.
The images from Jantar Mantar — tear gas drifting across the streets, young people being pushed and struck, a woman being slapped by a uniformed officer — are not isolated. They are symptoms. Symptoms of a policing culture that has not yet fully accepted that its authority comes from the people, not from the ability to overpower them.
If we want a democracy that is more than periodic elections, we need a police force that acts as a protector rather than a tool of suppression, intimidation, and exploitation. That means changing recruitment standards, changing training, changing the incentives that reward aggressive displays of force, and creating real consequences for excess. It means listening to the young people at Jantar Mantar instead of simply dispersing them.
This is not a partisan point. Governments of every colour have used the same heavy hand when it suited them. The consistent failure belongs to the institution and to the political class that has refused to transform it.
So where do we go from here?
First, independent, time-bound inquiries into the specific allegations of excessive and degrading force at these protests — inquiries that are not controlled by the same police hierarchy. Second, visible accountability when officers cross the line, not quiet transfers. Third, a serious national conversation about the purpose of policing in a constitutional democracy. And fourth, sustained public pressure so that the conversation does not fade once the tear gas clears and the cameras move on.
The young people at Jantar Mantar are demanding better institutions. One of those institutions is the police itself. If we cannot protect the right to peaceful assembly without turning the streets into a demonstration of dominance, then the claim that we are a mature democracy rings hollow.
That is the uncomfortable truth this moment forces us to confront.
Thanks for listening. Stay safe, stay alert, and keep asking the hard questions.
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