On July 20, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) gave a “Sansad Chalo” call to people across Delhi, exhorting them to march to Parliament. At that time, the CJP, along with other student organisations, had been agitating for five weeks at Jantar Mantar demanding the resignation of the then Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, over examination irregularities.
On the day of the march, Delhi witnessed a massive surge of protesters. Both ends of Jantar Mantar were packed to capacity. Tolstoy Road, Janpath Lane, Sansad Marg, and Jantar Mantar Road were choked with demonstrators, and more kept coming. What followed was brutal police action against the youngsters, with an unwarranted and unexpected level of vehemence.
The police resorted to lathicharges, tear gas shelling, even pellet-gun firing. Among those injured was Prashant Singh, a student of visual arts at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi. Originally from Bihar, Singh works as an artist’s apprentice to support himself. “I was in the inner circle of Connaught Place when the police started beating up the protesters. I managed to steer clear of the crowds but suddenly felt a sharp pain in my right arm. It seemed as if I was being pierced by tens of needles at the same time. My arm started bleeding profusely, and I couldn’t move because of the pain,” he told Frontline.
Singh had been hit by pellet shots. “I rushed to Lady Hardinge Hospital; even the doctors there were confused as to what had hit me. After being treated for a while, I was left without attendants as injured protesters kept coming in,” he said. Pellet shards are still lodged in his arm, which he finds hard to move.
Categorised as a “non-lethal” crowd-control method, pellet guns function like hunting shotguns. Each cartridge is packed with approximately 300 to 500 small lead pellets that, once fired, scatter in a roughly cone-shaped trajectory and can hit several people at the same time. Made primarily of lead—a dense, soft, and heavy metal—the pellets penetrate human skin with ease and often lodge themselves deep within muscle tissue. When fired at close range, they can kill.
One of the protesters, Sheikh Irshad Mansoori, was hit by 40 pellets all over his body, including in critical areas like his eyes, neck, and face. He could have lost vision in his left eye had he not undergone surgery to remove the splinters.
Sheikh Irshad Mansoori was hit by 40 pellets all over his body, including in critical areas like his eyes, neck, and face.
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By special arrangement
The most notorious case of pellet-gun use in India is from Jammu and Kashmir in 2016, when Central Reserve Police Force personnel fired them indiscriminately at the protesters who had gathered in the wake of Burhan Wani’s death. Thousands were injured, including bystanders and children. Srinagar hospitals were filled with victims with ruptured eyeballs.
Grave assault
Amnesty International labelled it as a “mass blinding crisis”, prompting the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) to form an expert committee to examine the situation. The seven-member committee explicitly ruled in 2016 that pellet guns are to be used only in “exceptional, rarest-of-rare situations”, specifically when rioters turn violent, pose a direct threat to life, or endanger public safety installations. Nothing like that happened on July 20.
“A seven-member committee has ruled that pellet guns are to be used only when rioters turn violent, or pose a threat to life or property. That did not happen on July 20.”
Along with Singh and Mansoori, former Special Director of the Intelligence Bureau and IPS officer Yashovardhan Azad filed a PIL petition in the Supreme Court on July 27 seeking a ban on the use of projectile action guns, including pump-action guns loaded wholly or partly with metallic pellets, to disperse civilian assemblies. Azad said: “Pellet guns should be banned in principle for two reasons. One is that you can control the trigger but not the outcome, which goes in a conical form of a cloudburst of metallic shrapnel, which can hit any part of the body. So, your aim cannot be accurate. Even if you are using a rubber bullet, you can aim at the leg so that it is less harmful. But you cannot control a pellet gun.” He explained that the history of pellet gun use is rooted in game hunting: it was designed to kill birds.
“These multiple-projectile systems are not used in any developed democracy. We should stop their use completely because we already have an array of non-lethal crowd-control measures, and an expert committee was constituted to evaluate alternative options. If the situation is overwhelming, security forces should maintain their distance, deploying water cannons or tear gas. When protesters advance too close, a lathicharge may be resorted to. But if a pellet gun is discharged in the midst of such chaos, the pellets will scatter indiscriminately, with deadly consequences,” he said.
The excessive use of police force went beyond the deployment of pellet guns. Many young protesters sustained severe injuries from being hit by batons. Over 100 protesters were hospitalised with fractured bones, head trauma, and broken ribs. A 19-year-old student of Delhi University might lose his eyesight permanently.
A police officer monitors CCTV footage from a mobile command-and-control vehicle at the Jantar Mantar protest site on July 20.
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Bhawika Chhabra/REUTERS
To avoid being identified, many personnel of the Delhi Police and the Rapid Action Force—both operating under the MHA–did not wear their name tags. This is a direct violation of a Supreme Court mandate that requires officers to display their name tags and badge numbers clearly at all times. Many were in civilian clothes, too. Numerous women were manhandled, groped, slapped, and physically assaulted by male police officers. In a video, a male police officer can be seen attempting to thrust a lathi in a woman’s buttocks.
Underhand methods
Some lathis had iron nails embedded in them, a clearly illegal move to increase the severity of the injuries they could inflict. The Delhi Police are also accused of resorting to underhand methods to discredit the protesters. Frontline found at least two vandalised cars parked near the protest site even though all roads leading to the area had been sealed for days. The vehicles could not have come there unless they had been deliberately planted. In a viral video, a Delhi Police officer can be seen shattering the windshield of a police van and running away when questioned by protesters.
On the morning of July 20, a truck filled with stones mysteriously appeared near the protest site. An investigation by Newslaundry found that the truck had been seized by Delhi Police on July 16 and was in the custody of the Parliament Street police station. How the truck came to be parked in the vicinity of the protest site is yet to be explained by the Delhi Police.
The former IPS officer Amod Kanth criticised the police action, pointing out mistakes in their conduct. “There was a serious lapse in estimating the size of the crowd. Whatever the initial estimate might have been, the preparations were commensurate with that assessment, which proved to be inaccurate. It is evident that nobody was prepared for the magnitude of the crowd that arrived from all directions,” he said.
Kanth further underscored that police officers working without name tags and assaulting protesters were a clear violation of established norms. “Without name tags or identification, no officer should perform official duties. When a police contingent is deployed to tackle a serious law-and-order situation, there is both collective responsibility and collective protection. However, individual acts of misconduct, such as those documented here, cannot be ignored. They warrant an inquiry,” he said.
“In a viral video, a Delhi Police officer can be seen shattering the windshield of a police van and running away when questioned by protesters.”
Many protesters have also complained of the use of mass surveillance at the site. Since June 6, many photographers wearing the tag “Delhi Police Photographer” were seen taking photos of the protesters. A PIL petition filed in Delhi High Court by the advocate Subhash Chandran and Aishe Ghosh, joint secretary of the Students’ Federation of India, argued that surveillance constitutes an intrusion into the bodily privacy and dignity of protesters. For instance, in the absence of adequate shelters, many female demonstrators continued their protest in rain-drenched clothing. The police personnel allegedly kept photographing and videographing them.
No public protocol authorising the surveillance
The PIL petition further highlighted that repeated requests were made for information regarding legal authority, data collection, storage, retention, and dissemination policies. But no statutory provision, executive instruction, or public protocol authorising the surveillance was disclosed.
Footwear collected after the July 20 protest march is displayed at Jantar Mantar as a symbol of the police crackdown, on July 22.
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PTI
“Surveillance resulted in protesters hesitating to publicly associate with the movement, and in self-censorship stemming from the fear of identification and future consequences. Yet no standard operating procedures [SOPs] were laid down for these surveillance measures,” Chandran said. Many protesters feel that their fundamental rights under Article 14, Article 19, and Article 21 of the Constitution were breached.
During the protests, many police officers were observed to be wearing videorecording smartglasses, which can record individuals without their knowledge. Frontline found that these glasses are developed by Dimension NXG Pvt. Ltd under the AjnaLens brand name. AjnaLens is a deep-tech startup “born at IIT Bombay”. It remains an unlisted private company with Lenskart as its primary investor.
Another PIL petition in the Supreme Court, filed by A.A. Rahim, a member of the Rajya Sabha from the CPI(M), challenged the use of facial recognition technology (FRT) and other biometric surveillance tools by the Delhi Police without any statutory framework or publicly disclosed safeguards. At the site, the Delhi Police had deployed a mobile surveillance vehicle, Ikshana, which is equipped with 360-degree and varifocal cameras that feed live footage into real-time facial recognition software to match crowd members with criminal databases. This vehicle is developed by Aditya Infotech Ltd under the brand name CP Plus.
“The Delhi Police SOPs state that CCTV cameras are meant primarily for estimating crowd size, identifying protesters when necessary, and ensuring public safety. Here, however, officers are intervening in people’s privacy. They are recording conversations and capturing facial data through FRT merely because individuals are participating in a protest. The crucial question is, what legal authority permits this? Without a legal framework, this amounts to unlawful surveillance,” Chandran said.
Ikshana, the mobile surveillance van, parked at the Jantar Mantar protest site on July 25.
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Bhawika Chhabra/REUTERS
The Delhi Police SOPs have protocols governing the collection, storage, and use of CCTV footage. “In this case, however,” Chandran said, “no such legal safeguards exist. The data is handled by private companies, creating the possibility that it can be misused at any time. Given the scale of cybercrime in India today, that raises serious concerns.”
A point to note here is that the EU has banned the use of FRT by law enforcement agencies in publicly accessible spaces.
The Delhi Police are known for their high-handedness and brutality in dealing with all agitations, from the JNU protests in 2016, to those in Jamia Millia Islamia in 2019, when the police barged into its library and bludgeoned students with batons, resulting in one student permanently losing sight in his left eye. What is new in the CJP protests is the sneaky use of technology, denoting perhaps the involvement of the deep state. Unsurprisingly, public confidence in the Delhi Police is at an all-time low and the demands for the resignation of Home Minister Amit Shah are gaining ground.
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