The events of 20 July are not a debate about protest. They are a test of whether the Republic polices its citizens or polices dissent itself. The legitimacy of a protest is a matter of public debate.
The legitimacy of police conduct is a matter of constitutional law. The two must never be confused, much less deliberately blurred.
The Sansad Chalo march at Jantar Mantar on 20 July has shifted the conversation away from the protesters’ demands to the methods used to silence them.
Reports and footage of police force against demonstrators force a blunt question: when does crowd control stop being law enforcement and start becoming punishment?
A democratic state is entitled to regulate assemblies, secure Parliament and prevent violence.
If protesters assault police personnel, destroy property, ignore dispersal orders or attempt to breach lawful security perimeters, the law does not merely permit intervention; it demands it.
Officers often have seconds, not minutes, to act. The Constitution does not ask the police to stand helpless while a crowd turns violent.
But urgency is not a blank cheque. Nor is “security” a magic word that converts every baton charge into legality. Constitutional policing rests on a harder principle: force must be the last proportionate resort, not the first instinct of an anxious state.
Even where public order is genuinely threatened, the State must still prove necessity, proportionality and reasonableness.
The Supreme Court, in Ramlila Maidan Incident v. Home Secretary, Union of India (2012), made that duty unmistakable. The police may restore order. They may not suspend restraint in the process.
That matters because the state’s favourite defence is often the least examined one: the crowd was volatile, the intelligence was urgent, the situation was sensitive, the timing was impossible. Sometimes that is true.
Often it is the language of post facto justification. And that is precisely why transparency is non-negotiable. A democratic state cannot demand public trust while hiding the basis of coercive action. If there was an imminent threat, disclose it. If there was not, then force was not a necessity; it was excess dressed in legal costume.
Nuremberg Principle IV remains instructive here, not because the situations are remotely comparable in scale, but because it rejected the defence of superior orders and affirmed that obedience to authority does not extinguish individual responsibility where a moral and legal choice exists.
Every officer entrusted with coercive power has an independent duty to act lawfully, proportionately and only to the extent necessary. A uniform is not a shield against accountability. It is a burden of accountability.
That is why police conduct must be judged separately from protest politics. Today’s demonstrators may represent one ideology; tomorrow’s may represent another. Governments will change. Protest movements will change.
The Constitution will not. If crowd control starts bending towards political convenience, the police cease to be neutral custodians of order and become instruments of selective intimidation. That is not governance. That is coercion with a badge.
The danger of excessive policing is not limited to bruises, detentions or the spectacle of force. Its real harm is structural. Democracies are not usually broken in one grand collapse. They are eroded through repeated acts that begin to look ordinary.
Every unnecessary baton charge lowers the threshold for the next one.
Every unchallenged abuse teaches the state that it can get away with more. Rights then survive only on paper, while citizens quietly learn what the law no longer protects in practice.
The rule of law insists that coercive power remain visible, accountable and answerable. The police enjoy a monopoly over force because society grants them exceptional authority. But exceptional authority carries an exceptional burden of explanation. A police officer does not act as an ordinary citizen.
Every arrest, every order and every baton raised are supposed to reflect the discipline of constitutional restraint, not the temper of state impatience.
The rule of law wears a nameplate. When that nameplate is missing, the officer ceases to appear as a public servant and starts looking like an anonymous agent of coercion. Anonymous force is not policing. It is accountability evaded by design.
If images and videos from 20 July show personnel without visible nameplates or identifying insignia, that is not a minor lapse in appearance.
It is a breach of the Supreme Court’s own directives and a direct insult to the idea that State power must be traceable. If the State cannot identify who used force, it is asking citizens to accept violence without responsibility.
And that is the deeper scandal. When the state’s response becomes the main story, the state has already failed. Excessive force does not restore legitimacy. It destroys it. It does not calm public scrutiny. It redirects it.
Every unnecessary baton charge invites judicial review, weakens institutional credibility and widens the gulf between the governed and those who govern in their name.
The appropriate response is neither hand-wringing nor denial. It is accountability with teeth. The Commissioner of Police should explain the operational decision to use force. The Home Ministry should place the relevant records before the appropriate parliamentary forum.
An independent magisterial inquiry should examine the chain of command, the warnings given, the alternatives ignored and the precise point at which restraint gave way to brute force. If the police acted within the law, scrutiny will clear them. If they did not, the Republic must stop pretending this is a misunderstanding.
The police have been given powers that no ordinary citizen possesses: to detain, to search, to disperse and, when absolutely necessary, to use force.
Those powers exist because the Constitution authorises limited coercion in the service of public order. But the moment coercion becomes convenience, the State stops governing and starts dominating.
The social contract frays not when citizens protest, but when they conclude that protest itself is being treated as the offence.
Every generation inherits a different political fight. The constitutional promise remains the same: rights are not privileges reserved for the agreeable, the popular or the politically convenient.
If citizens begin to believe that Article 19 freedoms come with the real risk of being beaten into silence, then democracy is still functioning only in the narrowest legal sense. In every meaningful sense, it is already being hollowed out.
Democracies rarely collapse because constitutions disappear. They decline because constitutional values are steadily abandoned in the everyday exercise of power. That is the real legacy of 20 July. Not the barricades.
Not the slogans. Not even the protest. The legacy is whether the Republic still has the courage to look at its own use of force and call it by its name. A democracy worthy of its Constitution does not hide behind the uniform. It makes the uniform answer.
Views expressed are that of the author and do not reflect EastMojo’s position on this or any other issue.
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