Violence during Bharat Bandh, JNU agitation underlines need to make India safer place to protest

If democracy accords freedoms of speech and the right to protest that are inviolate, a critical function of a democratic government is maintaining law and order at all times. This translates to the police and law enforcement agencies in a state being able to realistically assess the groundswell that develops in response to emergent situations. In the India of recent times, rage is making itself visible on the streets. It assumes the form of students who feel stressed about having to re-appear for an exam for no fault of theirs, of teachers who sense a lack of political will in preserving higher education, of farmers who are buried under loans because credit is simpler to access but income is a lost cause, and castes and tribes who feel betrayed by the state machinery’s disregard of their social vulnerability. However, even serious issues are prone to being played up to arouse insecurities particularly in the minds of the youth. To understand whether India is safe for protests, one can look at what transpired over the last two weeks. On 20 March, the Supreme Court banned automatic arrests of public servants under the SC/ST Prevention of Atrocities Act, 1989, triggering widespread criticism and outcry from the Dalit community. In April, protests broke out in Rajasthan as a 5,000-strong mob set ablaze the houses of two Dalit MLAs , even as the death toll from the nationwide stir by Dalit groups rose to 11 with two more succumbing to injuries in Madhya Pradesh. On Monday, the Centre rushed 1,700 anti-riot police personnel to Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Punjab after protests turned violent in the four states during the Bharat Bandh called by Dalit outfits. The detail worth noting here is that the bandh took place 13 days after the judgment. Since law and order is a state subject, didn’t the local administration, the police and its network of informers have adequate time to gauge the extent of public anger? The home ministry sent eight companies of the RAF to Uttar Pradesh, four to Madhya Pradesh and three to Rajasthan. A curfew was imposed in Madhya Pradesh’s Morena, Gwalior and Bhind after a student leader was killed in the firing. Two companies of the Border Security Force (BSF) were sent to Punjab. Two state-owned buses were torched in Azamgarh, Uttar Pradesh leaving plenty of passengers injured. “There should have been more political will to shadow those who announced dates for the protest. The police forces are handcuffed by state governments,” said Rajender Singh, Deputy Commissioner with the BSF. [caption id=“attachment_4419677” align=“aligncenter” width=“825”]  A protest by the Krantikari Yuva Sangathan against privatisation of education. Image courtesy: Facebook/Krantikari Yuva Sangathan[/caption] The local police chiefs or the district magistrate hold the power to order the dispersal of people and enforce Section 144. In a state like Andhra Pradesh, for example, the ratio of police to civilians is 1:6000, which means that for over 8 crore civilians, there are just over a lakh police personnel. This is why, forces like the CRPF and its specialised sub-force, the Rapid Action Force, are summoned when matters escalate. But they, too, act at the behest of local officers. The RAF is a force which is expected to get to the crisis situation within a minimal time. Earlier, there were 10 battalions, headed by an inspector general officer. Five more battalions have been recently added. Each battalion has a rough strength of 1,100 and it is stationed in places like Meerut, Aligarh, Bhopal, Mumbai, Delhi, Coimbatore, Ahmadabad and Hyderabad. “There should be better integration of the Central and state forces. Although they both fall under the purview of the Ministry of Home Affairs, the method of operation is different. One area that security forces can work on is technological advancement. We still resort to traditional techniques of suppression like tear gas and water cannons, but non-lethal technologies like soundwaves can be deployed to control the crowd and equipment like transportable barriers can be brought into use because the trouble spot might keep changing as the protest moves,” said Anil Shekhawat, a security expert on deputation with the National Institute of Disaster Management (NIDM). Since the early 2000s, American soldiers in Western Iraq used the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD), which blasts sounds in a beam at a numbing 150 decibels. Prashant Dhar of the CRPF, who has been a member of the RAF, recalled how the local police were aggressively reacting to members of the Gujjar community who blocked a railway line in Rajasthan in 2008 where the RAF was asked to step in. “The reaction needs to be specific to the peculiarity of the situation and forces cannot be mechanically deployed and expected to follow a single code of conduct. If there is stone pelting, then the answer is stone pelting; application of force must be in proportion to the nature of threat with minimal use of force,” he said, adding that since the RAF isn’t familiar with the sensitivities of the place, the force relies on information supplied by local authorities. The states also have an armed constabulary whose image and role needs to be re-assessed. The Provincial Armed Constabulary (PAC) for instance has, over the years, acquired the image of an anti-Muslim force with a history of incidents where it allegedly opened fire and killed civilians. Post the Moradabad riots in the 1980s, the central government had ordered the Uttar Pradesh Government to pull back 1,800 PAC men from the riot-torn pockets where they had allegedly wreaked havoc. The combined intelligence of the local police authorities must aid preventive mechanism, for instance, putting police beats on congested routes and conducting flag marches to show that the forces have arrived in potentially volatile areas. One way to do this is through Facebook and Twitter, where intimations for mass gatherings and protests are circulated. A retired bureaucrat from Hyderabad, who wished to remain anonymous, said that one of the factors to keep in mind is that the routes of previous bandhs shouldn’t determine where the police should be placed because violence doesn’t retrace its own path but is impassioned to leave a bold new trail. He also shared that old Hyderabad is the only place where an RAF unit is deployed every Friday. Last August, within a few hours of the CBI court’s verdict in the rape case against Dera Sacha Sauda chief Gurmeet Ram Rahim Singh, 20 columns of the army were requisitioned. Today, the strength of the Central Armed Police Forces or CAPF (BSF, ITBP, CISF, CRPF, SSB and Assam Rifles) is nearly one million. To what extent is the Army’s intervention required? Rakesh Sharma, retired Adjutant General of the Indian Army told Firstpost that armed forces are getting more and more involved in civil society of late and that is the reason the Army has been resisting involvement in battling left-wing extremism. He said that the internal security thought-process is changing. The agitation staged by the Patidar reservation agitation in 2015 resulted in 14 deaths and another 38 were killed in the wake of the Ram Rahim verdict. “Today, the type of internal security is different from what was conceptualised earlier. When roads are broken, you know you are combatting dominant forces. The rank and file feels the strain of getting involved,” he said, explaining that the Army was brought in late during the Panchkula violence and it may be more worthwhile for the internal forces to map and manage violent uprisings within the borders. Protesters’ accountability towards state property cannot be left out of the debate. Hence, even for protesters, it is necessary to be aware of the potential legal complications of breaking theboundaries of peace in a protest. For instance, a recent photo of a former Jawaharlal Nehru University student Sheena Thakur who was being assaulted by the police at a protest staged on 23 March demanding the suspension of Prof Atul Johri, went viral on Facebook. Today, 24 student protesters have an FIR registered against them under the Prevention of Damage to Public Property Ordinance, 1984. Sheena told Firstpost that the FIR can damage their careers and bar them from moving out of the country. While Sheena’s Facebook post invoked sympathy, Madhur Verma, the PRO of Delhi Police also tweeted videos of students provoking the police to react at the protest where some journalists were also injured. He told Firstpost that an SHO from Hauz Khas police station suffered a head injury. The interface of this act under for which the police have registered the FIR and the fundamental right to peaceful protest must become public knowledge. The 2016 judgement on the fundamental right to peaceful protest held that the standard of proof required for proving police misconduct such as brutality, torture and custodial violence and for holding the State accountable is high and is only for patent and incontrovertible violation. The petitioners were migrants from Jammu & Kashmir and the case was being heard by a bench comprising Justices AK Sikri and RK Agrawal. The petitioners alleged that they had planned a peaceful protest march up to Delhi. Interestingly, while the bench held that there was a violation of fundamental rights due to police misconduct, it also held that petitioners were to be blamed to some extent and directed compensation of Rs 2 lakh to one and Rs 1 lakh to another.