Delhi Protest: Why the State’s Response Should Concern Every Voter

India is called the world’s largest democracy for a simple reason. It has the largest electorate in the world, over 99 crore registered voters by the Election Commission’s own count in January 2025, and every government in this country has drawn its legitimacy from them. So what are these citizens to do when the vote itself begins to slip out of their hands? Do they have the right to protest? The thousands who tried to reach Jantar Mantar for the Delhi protest on October 10 were asking for nothing more than what is already theirs. They were protesting to protect their right to vote, which flows from Article 326 of the Constitution and is given effect by the Representation of the People Act. When that right is being taken away, how else are people in a democracy to make themselves heard, if not peacefully, at a site the state itself has set aside for dissent?

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When the Living Are Declared Dead

The reasons given for striking citizens off the rolls during the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) are hard to believe, and they are what brought people out for the protest in Delhi. Living people have been marked dead. In some parts, voters were listed as deceased on the strength of death certificates that matched their names but carried different parents, spouses and addresses. Elsewhere, citizens were flagged because a mother and child were less than 15 years apart in age, because siblings were born less than nine months apart, because twins shared a date of birth, or because their name was spelt differently from their father’s.

In some cases, a household with a large family was struck off because it seemed suspicious, as did a woman whose father’s name appeared on one document and her husband’s on another, which describes almost every married woman in India. Many were removed simply because their names could not be traced to a roll prepared in 2002. An analysis of the Commission’s own state-wise draft rolls shows more than 13 crore names left out across 30 states and Union Territories. Former Chief Election Commissioner S Y Quraishi, who has put the deletions at 13 to 14 crore, has called them illogical, unreasonable, arbitrary and mischievous, questioned whether so many people could really have migrated, and said that removing even one valid voter is unconstitutional.

Since Gandhi Jayanti, a date that recalls the power of peaceful protest, citizens have been making their way to Jantar Mantar again and again, and again and again they have been detained. Students, opposition parties across the spectrum and ordinary voters have taken up the same demand in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. What unites them is a simple conviction that the institution entrusted with their vote owes them an answer.

The Cockroach Janta Party called the Delhi protest on October 10 to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, whom the protesters hold responsible for the way the revision has been carried out.What we are seeing on the streets has its roots inside the Election Commission. When it emerged that Gyanesh Kumar had been taking decisions on the revision largely on his own, overriding the repeated objections of his two fellow commissioners, the crisis of trust stopped being a matter of opposition politics. If those within the Commission could not get a hearing, ordinary voters had every reason to fear they would not either. Saturday's Delhi protest was a chance for the state to listen. It chose to silence them instead.

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Detained Before the First Slogan

What the Delhi Police did on the day of the protest should trouble every Indian, whatever their politics. A democracy is tested by how it treats those who disagree with it, and on Saturday the state treated dissenters as a problem to be removed before they could speak. Abhijeet Dipke and his colleagues were detained inside their aircraft before they could step off it. Dhruv Rathee was picked up at his family’s home. Four former chief ministers, Arvind Kejriwal, Mamata Banerjee, Pinarayi Vijayan and Manik Sarkar, were taken away before they could reach Jantar Mantar, and Kejriwal was carried bodily to a police bus. By evening, more than 7,000 people had been detained, most of them before they ever reached the protest site. To hold citizens for what they intend to do peacefully is to punish them for an intention the Constitution protects, and it strikes at the personal liberty guaranteed by Article 21.

Just as troubling was what the state was willing to do to everyone else. To keep protesters away from one designated site, it closed 45 Metro stations, cancelled dozens of trains, cut mobile internet across the heart of the capital for 24 hours, and reportedly had passengers taken off a train in Madhya Pradesh on the suspicion that they might be heading to Delhi. Commuters, students and families who had nothing to do with the protest paid for the state’s anxiety. A government confident of its case would not need to bring its own capital to a standstill to avoid hearing it.

Our Constitution anticipated exactly this tension. It guarantees the freedom of speech and the right to assemble peaceably and without arms, and it allows the state to restrict these freedoms only when the restriction is reasonable and genuinely tied to public order. Fear of what might happen is not enough to forbid a peaceful protest outright. Yet on the day of the Delhi protest, more than 30,000 police and paramilitary personnel turned the heart of the capital into a fortress, and Jantar Mantar, the one place meant for dissent, stood empty. That empty square says a great deal about what the state considers a reasonable restriction.

Most worrying of all is how lightly the Supreme Court’s word was treated. A day before the protest, the Court told the Centre it could regulate movement but must not stop Metro and train services altogether, observing that one should not use a hammer to kill a fly. The government’s own law officer assured the Court that the curbs would be reconsidered. What followed was a trim from 57 closed stations to 45, and trains that still did not run. A contempt petition is now before the Court. 

The treatment of journalists cannot pass without comment. Reporters from Newslaundry and Scroll, along with several other journalists covering the Delhi protest, were detained despite showing their press cards, and Newslaundry’s official phones were seized. The law allows preventive detention only when the police know of a plan to commit a cognisable offence that cannot otherwise be prevented. The Delhi Police owe the public an answer on what offence these reporters were about to commit. Reporting is their job, and when the state takes away their phones, it takes away the public’s right to know what was done in its name.

Where Else Can Citizens Go?

If citizens cannot protest peacefully at Jantar Mantar, where in India may they protest at all? The Delhi protest was planned at the very place the capital sets aside for dissent, and the Supreme Court held in 2018, in Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v Union of India, that protests there cannot be banned outright. Refusing permission at that site and then sealing it off with barricades sits uneasily with that ruling. A democracy that leaves its citizens nowhere to gather is telling them their grievances have nowhere to go.

At the heart of the Delhi protest is a question this country must answer honestly: do the people of a nation that calls itself the mother of democracy still have the right to dissent? The courts have answered it more than once. In 1973, the Supreme Court held that the state cannot use its power over public spaces to deny citizens the right to assemble. In 2012, after the Ramlila Maidan crackdown, it called the right to protest a fundamental feature of a vibrant democracy. In 2020, it held that prohibitory orders cannot be used to suppress the legitimate expression of grievance. The principle running through all of them is simple: the state must make room for dissent, because dissent is how a democracy corrects itself. On October 10, the state chose to leave no room at all. It was a black day for the world's largest democracy, and one its voters will not forget soon.