Squaring the Circle: Why Delhi's Dissent Cannot be Contained
“Time and again the government [of the day] has opposed these protests, [and] at times engaged with them critically,” Rasheed Kidwai, a political analyst in New Delhi, told Al Jazeera. “But protests have run centrally through India’s story all along.” Kidwai highlights a key concept that shapes the connotations of protests: centrality. Protest is a mass congregation of people demanding change from a larger governing body, from which dissent stems. Geographically also nucleated, protests are staged in localities with government buildings that increase visibility, and these localities often make up the centre of cities. Centrality is required to stimulate direct conversation with governing bodies and ensure that access and proximity to the institutions of power are available. The assignment of a designated site (or sites) for protest, therefore, places the success of dissent in the hands of the very people against whom this dissent exists. The decentralisation of protest is not a picture of public safety and administrative concern, but a wrench in the gears of the collective expression of disenfranchised groups. This wrench, however, does not bring down the entire machine. Instead, it activates the unlocking of multiple smaller units of protest, an assemblage of dissent.
On 12 October 2026, Anurag Kumar, the Commissioner of Delhi Police, publicly denotified Jantar Mantar as a protest site, effectively making it illegal to use for dissent. But the excavation of the centre started earlier, with the mass detentions of protesters in and around Jantar Mantar. The heavy barricading and detainments attempted to prevent the creation of a centre in the first place, relying on the absence of a mobilised force to discourage protests. When the site of protest became unreliable, public gaze shifted to Neha Bora, President of the All India Students’ Association (AISA); with Jantar Mantar sealed, they became the point around which the protest reassembled. After police forces blocked demonstrators from reaching Jantar Mantar, Bora called for a regroup at Dilli Haat, remarking that “Dilli Haat becomes Jantar Mantar today.” RK Ashram turned into another site of congregation on the following day, 11th October, at their call. The removal of one centre did not derail protest, only shifted the nucleus from a place to a person and a call, relocatable and unbound by bright yellow barricades. Their continuous detainment, however, provided another disruption to the centre, extracting the node that made these protests portable and visible to the corridors of power. But the removal of Jantar Mantar as a solid core seemed to fan the tendrils of dissent towards other outlets, morphing detention centres and buses into separate silos of protest.
Detention is the central instrument of control over an unpermitted protest. It removes bodies from a site and attaches a cost to returning, using dispersal as a tool to circumvent physical mobilisation. Detention is also, in most cases, an endpoint. A person sitting behind the barred windows of a school bus employed by the Delhi Police has already paid the price for protesting and is now (ideally) invulnerable to the consequences, providing them a twisted freedom through their containment. This turns detention centres and buses into a territory of contradiction, spaces of low-risk dissent where permission is unenforceable because the punishment has already been carried out. A third set of nodes that stemmed from the second disruption gave rise to multiple flash protests, as demonstrators turned the likes of Daulatpur Community Centre and Yamuna Sports Complex into sites of dissent. A dissent that lost its proximity to power, but not its visibility. Access to the attention of the state was carved out of this stubborn rhizome of protests, and the tactic of decentralisation lost its effectiveness as what defined the centre changed with every node.
Where barricades and mass detainments failed, the bureaucratisation of protest attempted to curb these public displays. The announcement of the denotification of Jantar Mantar listed three alternative protest sites suggested by the Delhi Police: Ramlila Maidan, CBD Ground, and Burari Ground in ascending order of distance from Jantar Mantar: four kilometres, thirteen kilometres, and twenty-one kilometres. Although nothing compels protestors to move demonstrations, as these are just ‘suggestions’, they are still calculated recommendations by authorities. The mere fact of their increasing disconnection from the previously designated site reads as a stifling of the movement, an attempt to cast a blindfold over the curious eyes of the rest of the nation.
It is not just proximity, however, that these suggestions take away. Times of India notes that Ramlila Maidan requires a booking for it to be available as a place of protest, and that it is not available until the end of December. A day’s booking costs ₹50,000 plus a refundable ₹55,000 security deposit, so the initial outlay, including taxes, comes to ₹1.21 lakh. The very language used to describe this state-recommended ground turns dissent and public outcry into a spectacle that can be scheduled, bid for, and booked. A movement that demands accountability and a reinstatement of democratic duties from the government should be treated as such. Due to the constraints that ‘booking’ Ramlila Maidan presents, which is also the site closest to Jantar Mantar, there are essentially only two viable options—CBD and Burari Ground. A closer look at these areas, however, unearths a new explanation for why they were picked by the state.
Reportage by The Hindu and Times of India shows that Ramlila falls under the Chandni Chowk constituency, where the BJP has held the seat since 2014 and won by more than half the vote in 2019 and 2024. Burari falls under North East Delhi, and CBD Ground under East Delhi. In both, the BJP has held the seat since 2014 with more than 50% of the vote share in 2019 and 2024. This paints a politically strategic, jaded picture—all three of the areas put forward as replacements for Jantar Mantar, which is currently also governed by the BJP, are in constituencies that have a history of supporting the current government. The protests target the Electoral Commission’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, an exercise the Chief Election Commissioner defends as weeding out duplicate and ineligible voters, but which protesters deem a tool of vote chori through the removal of the votes of minority groups who are largely not BJP supporters. Recommending demonstrations to move to neighbourhoods sympathetic to pro-SIR sentiment is therefore a futile attempt to disperse the movement. Read in tandem with the multiple reported instances of members of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, Bajrang Dal, and other right-wing Hindu groups harassing protestors, the protests become a performance for an audience that is already pitted against them.
The state’s decision to take this step in neutralising the protests signals a desperation that is brought about by the failure of its earlier goal of decentralisation. Jantar Mantar’s denotification removed the shared geographic point, and the detention of its most visible organiser removed a mobile one. What remained is dissent that no longer needs a designated ground to exist: a regrouping point easily changed through social media, a bus surrounded at a flyover, a holding centre where protest begins once enforcement has finished.
(Edited by Suryansh Jalan and Maya Ribeiro)
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