On 10 October, Delhi witnessed something that has become a familiar template of this regime over the past decade. It weaponised the police and paramilitary forces to stifle dissent, prevent people from speaking out, and unleash brutal violence against them—men, women and children alike. No one is spared. Advocates are being subjected to brutality; seeing someone like Shadan Farasat being manhandled by the police is both disturbing and cruel. The goons, without any fear or remorse, are beating children and women on the streets, right in front of the Delhi Police. When the government does not know how to handle dissenters in a constitutionally valid manner and resorts only to brute force and right-wing goons, it becomes clear that it has lost control over legally justified means of governance and descended into paralysis. The Delhi Police is not merely obeying orders; it is also complicit in such acts of violence. The distinction between goons in uniform and those without uniform disappeared on this day.
What, Then, Is Different?
The CJP movement has called out the government for its cowardice, its flaws and its fear of dissent. That fear has now morphed into paranoia. Preventive detention, as provided for under Article 22 of the Constitution, cannot be carried out in the manner we witnessed on this date. Thousands of people had been detained. The basic criterion for ordering preventive detention is the existence of sufficient grounds to believe that a person may pose a threat to, inter alia, the security of the State or public order. The grounds for such detention must be communicated to the person concerned, who is also entitled to make a representation against it. What we witnessed on this day, however, was people being dragged away inhumanely. It would be overly optimistic to believe that they were informed of the grounds for their detention, and it would be absurd, to say the least, to assume that they were allowed to make representations against it. The mass detentions and restrictions on protest in Delhi demand serious scrutiny. The only rationale for these detentions was the paranoia of a government afraid of its own people. It is a government unwilling to listen to any dissent whatsoever.
This is a tragedy; this is the truth; and this is much more than an Emergency. It is a juridicide; it is also an instance of authoritarian legalism. When a government becomes scared of its own people, it begins to unleash violence in various forms: it attempts to colonise them, endeavours to intimidate them through the operation of draconian laws, detains them and restricts their freedom of movement and expression, tries to portray itself as the victim, and turns people against one another in the name of religion by fostering a sense of othering. The tragedy is also evident in the fact that this strategy has succeeded to an extent. The Delhi Police has long been a weapon of the government, and whether during the farmers’ struggle, the anti-CAA-NRC protests, or student-youth demonstrations over the NEET paper leak, it has inflicted violence on a massive scale under the pretext of following ‘orders’. The resulting visuals have seared our collective consciousness. It is heart-rending to see this brutality continue to intensify.
Exposure to Violence
The constant acts of violence that have come to dominate the mass media and social media have, to an extent, made society so numb or desensitised to violence that it may no longer even prick our conscience. That, too, is not society’s fault. People may experience and process pain differently, sometimes with markedly different intensities. Nonetheless, no person of sound conscience can deny the existence of this pain. The language adopted by the protesters—the youth of this country participating in the movement against voter-list manipulation—is the language of complaint. It also reflects the pain that this regime has inflicted on its own people for more than a decade, across multiple protests. It is shameful to remain silent and do or say nothing.
The freedoms of movement and expression are too precious to be placed at the mercy of a paranoid government. It is pointless to cite the various Supreme Court judgments affirming the same principle: the courts are aware of it, yet remain inactive. Some judges are accomplices, while institutions serve as an alibi for this butchering of constitutional values.
Crony Capitalism
Nevertheless, some people continue to support this regime because of their own vested capitalist or other interests. However, as noted earlier, the government has successfully pitted innocent people against one another, and they cannot see beyond the smokescreen it has created. They are unemployed or, if employed, lack social security and labour rights because those rights were diluted while people were dying of COVID-19! One can only hope that there will be some redemption.
The crony-capitalist model of governance has offered this country nothing but vanity for the middle class under the guise of achche din. Mere consumerism is what this system offers—everything is a product, and the rich are allowed to become super-rich. This system necessitates and sustains a paranoid government that will lock down our cities, detain people and crush dissent, however peaceful and democratic, whenever its foundations are threatened.
Hope
It may sound hopeless, but hope always lies with the people—the people who struggle to survive life’s difficulties and yet remain sufficiently committed to care about these values rather than dismiss them as merely abstract constructs. It is not merely about defeating a tyrannical government in elections; it is about preserving and developing constitutional values and upholding them despite misery, unfairness and the unequal application of the law. Even today, equality remains elusive. Those who do not understand the intricacies of the Constitution understand one thing: the country is now ruled by an arrogant despot who has scant regard for the rights of ordinary people. People did not tolerate British tyranny; they did not tolerate the excesses of Indira Gandhi during 1975–77. Given how rapidly the situation has evolved over the past several months, they are now ready to take Narendra Modi head-on. Gyanesh Kumar is only the face. The legitimacy of the Modi government will be undermined if Gyanesh Kumar goes.
Nothing is permanent. Yet it is impossible to predict whether this government will be defeated in the next election or whether the election itself will be free and fair. Life is a process of making meaning; we choose to strive for the things to which we assign meaning. We must re-emphasise that the constitutional and democratic values of equality, freedom and dignity remain meaningful. Although it should be basic and self-evident that everyone deserves to be treated as a human being, this principle needs to be reiterated more often, in the hope that it will one day reach even the deaf ears of the Delhi Police, the Union Government and, most importantly, the judiciary.
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Ayush Bajpai is a lawyer based in Mumbai and a graduate of NALSAR University of Law, Hyderabad. He organised the Lecture Series on Constitutionalism during his time at NALSAR. Sandeep Pandey is the Secretary General of the Socialist Party (India)
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