How Delhi stopped a protest before it started

In July, a 49-day protest at Jantar Mantar by the Cockroach Janata Party forced the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The move was seen as a rare setback for the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which has been in power for 12 years and has a strong public image.

In response to growing protests across the country against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter rolls, the party organized a second rally called "Jantar Mantar 2.0." With ten days' notice this time, the government was able to mobilize all of its resources to prevent the event from happening.

Four days before the protest, the Home Ministry authorized 221 companies of the central security forces, or roughly 23,000 personnel, to travel to Delhi. They added 80 additional companies two days later. The Home Secretary instructed police chiefs throughout the nation to prevent people from traveling to the capital, and the police ordered hotels in central Delhi to turn away visitors.

On October 10 and in the days before, this is how it developed and how far it extended.

Closing the railways is not a small event. On Friday, entire trains did not depart Howrah or Mumbai because the long-distance trains were cancelled at the stations where they originate. The majority of the cancellations, however, affected the locals and passenger trains that transport people from the surrounding towns to Delhi. Anyone who had intended to take the train had one day to find an alternative, or none, as the railway posted its announcements on October 9th, the day before.

The same Friday afternoon, the police letters made their way to the Supreme Court [WHAT DOES THIS MEAN?]

The Home Ministry also ordered the mobile internet shut. This was something it had done nine times in July and again on October 2 for the previous protests at Jantar Mantar, but never to this degree. In contrast to those orders, which covered 1.5 km around the site, this one covered 4 km, or roughly seven times the area.

Neither of these orders was easily accessible to the public and only came to light when shared via a news agency [WHO?] at 6:56pm on Friday, a mere 3 hours before the internet was to be cut.

Inside Delhi, the orders found themselves extending up to 27 km from the protest site. A common pattern that has emerged with detentions at such protests involves protestors being picked up in buses and driven around the city, finally being dropped far from where they were picked up. In July, much of these detentions lasted a few hours. October 10, however, saw detentions late into the night and in some cases until the next morning. These protestors were held in stadiums and buildings on the edges of the city with no internet available. Social media videos also showed that some of these sites did not meet basic needs, like having clean water to drink.

Limiting movement in the city is another way to keep people from getting to the protest. Shutting metro stations for a protest is not new; Delhi has done it since 2011, and most of the 45 metro stations shut down on October 10 have been shut before. What is new is how far out it went. Twenty were between 4 km and 10 km from the protest site, five were farther away than 10 km, and 12 had never been closed for a protest before. Some 45 are the stations that students use, such as Vishwa Vidyalaya, for Delhi University, and Jamia Millia Islamia.

The same few stations around Parliament have been closed every time since December 2019. For the protests against the citizenship law, the stations were closed all the way in Jamia, which is across the river that divides the city. For the protests by farmers, they were closed around to the north of the city. On October 10, these shut downs happened everywhere.

Since 2011, 414 stations have been closed, 137 of which were brought on by protests at Jantar Mantar in 2026.

Despite all of this there was scattered coordination on the ground, from Thursday to Sunday. The protest was called for Saturday, and not only by CJP. Left parties, student leaders and opposition leaders all gathered around Delhi, were determined to show up and attempt trying to get to the site.

This was handled, as quoted by the Supreme Court, in the manner of “a hammer to swat a fly.” More than 20,000 police and central forces were spread across the city, so a protest that cropped up anywhere was put down within 20 or 30 minutes. Getting to the protest site became a sign in and of itself, which led to protests happening in different parts of the city, with people working together as best they could.

The closures were supposed to separate people, complicate communication once you were inside the area without internet, and disrupt the momentum of the protest. There were arrests in cities far away, hostels and houses were raided to find potential protestors and prevent them from joining the demonstrations, journalists and prominent people such as Youtuber Dhruv Rathee were held at home, and anyone who managed to assemble at all was carried off to holding centres across the city.

On that day, though, if you had to work around the area, even if you had completely no interest in protesting, there was not much you could do about it. One in every seven metro stations was closed; while the Delhi Metro records a normal Saturday ridership of almost 58 lakh, on October 10 the count dropped to almost 32 lakh.

Earlier, shutting down one metro station still meant you could get off at the nearest next one and walk or take an auto to the site. For instance, while the metro station nearest to the protest site, Janpath, was shut on October 2, you could still get off at Shivaji Stadium which was a 14-minute walk away. The airport-only line metro station was the closest on October 10, and it took about 30 minutes to walk there. Chandni Chowk, the nearest regular station, was almost an hour away on foot.

Beyond those attempting to reach the demonstration, the widespread shutdowns inconvenienced general transit users, depriving people living in nearly 57 km2 of access to a metro station within a 15-minute walk.

For the 229 train cancellations, rail officials gave mixed messages. They said that 218 were due to planned protests, 62 were due to expected traffic jams, and 52 trains were listed in both lists. Due to the cancellations, long-distance services between cities like Mumbai, Kolkata, Patna, Lucknow, and Katra were stopped.

Convening on a Sunday, the Supreme Court issued a series of directives and the bench ruled that both the Metro and national railways "shall function normally," mandated that internet services remain unhindered, and explicitly prohibited unlawful detentions, focusing "particularly in cases of peaceful unarmed assemblage of people."

Security forces ignored the court rulings, detaining at least 43 journalists over the next two days.

Detainees were loaded onto buses, driven around the capital, and released at locations as far as 25 kilometers from where they were picked up. Police confiscated cameras and cell phones, and one reporter claimed to have been assaulted for refusing to remove the video, all of which rights activists describe as attempts to prevent the media from covering future protests.

The protest site itself was also canceled at the same time. An official order made public on Monday showed that the police commissioner had taken away the right to hold protests at Jantar Mantar, which had been a place for such displays for more than 30 years. Demonstrations have been moved to new places, such as Ramlila Maidan, the northern Burari ground, and the eastern CBD ground, which are much farther from the city center.

This is the most recent step in a decades-long effort by the government to move protests away from government buildings. "First they took away India Gate, then they took away Boat House, and now they have taken away Jantar Mantar," one protester said during the week's events, referring to moves that happened in the 1990s.

On 16 October, a week after the protest, CJP tried to protest again. Its founders were detained and driven to Jaffarpur Kalan, the police station on the western edge of the city where a former chief minister had been taken six days earlier.

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