Police Power and Protest — Who Watches the Watchmen at Jantar Mantar?

This piece builds directly on our earlier analysis of the same crackdown, but flips the camera from the protester to the police:

Right to Protest in India — What the Constitution Guarantees, What the Courts Have Restricted — start here if this theme is new to you. It covers the constitutional foundation: Article 19’s built-in limits, Section 163 BNSS as an everyday tool, and the regulation-versus-prohibition line drawn through Himat Lal Shah, MKSS, Anuradha Bhasin and Shaheen Bagh.

On 20 July, the Cockroach Janta Party’s “Chalo Sansad” march from Jantar Mantar turned into clashes. Police used tear gas and lathi charges to stop protesters from reaching Parliament. Metro stations shut, and many marchers lost mobile connectivity.

The Delhi High Court has now sought responses from the Centre and Delhi Police on petitions alleging excessive force. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, orally declined a request to take up the matter on its own. The Hindu’s Explained piece walks through what the Constitution, the BNSS, the NHRC manual and Supreme Court judgments say about when police can use force on a protest — and how much.

Here’s a detail most readers will scroll past, but UPSC won’t. The BNSS says every police officer making an arrest must wear accurate, visible identification of their name. But for officers doing crowd control — lathi charge, tear gas, dispersal — there is no such requirement.

Videos from the march showed personnel with covered faces and no name tags. Think about what that means: the moment force is most likely to be used is exactly the moment the officer using it cannot be identified. A citizen who wants to complain about a specific officer has no name to complain against. Accountability needs an address — and the law left this address blank.

The way out. Extend the D.K. Basu logic to crowd control — amend the BNSS or police standing orders to require every officer on dispersal duty to display a visible alphanumeric ID (a unique number on the helmet or chest, like UK police shoulder numbers). A complaint of excessive force needs a specific officer to attach to — a number makes that possible, and an officer who knows they are identifiable applies force more carefully. The D.K. Basu arrest guidelines worked on exactly this logic: visibility disciplines behaviour.