When a state cannot stop a movement in the streets, it shifts the struggle to the courtroom. This is one of the oldest tricks in the repertoire of power. The Modi government, since assuming power, has repeatedly used this tactic to suppress dissent. In 2018, it incarcerated 16 rights activists in the Bhima Koregaon case; in 2020, it sought to punish those who challenged its Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA). The list of such cases, before and since, is long. India’s judicial system has increasingly become a black hole, sucking in dissent against the government and leaving those who challenge it trapped in protracted legal battles. The government now appears to be using it to contain the nationwide protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, who has emerged as a single biggest threat to Indian democracy—and a crucial asset to the Modi–Shah regime’s hold on power.

The question is whether it will work. Having suffered a setback during the first Jantar Mantar protest in July, the government was determined to take no chances this time. It prepared to deal with the Cockroach Janta Party’s (CJP) call for an October 10 mobilisation with the zeal of a mud wrestler. Its paranoia was palpable. The capital was virtually sealed, as though under attack by enemy forces. Tens of thousands of police and paramilitary personnel were deployed; roadblocks erected; mobile internet suspended within a four-kilometre radius; metro stations closed; and buses and detention facilities readied for mass detentions. Drones and facial-recognition systems were added to the security apparatus. Under the procedural pretext of denying permission for the Jantar Mantar protest, the Delhi Police appeared prepared to use the full force of the state to prevent the mobilisation.

As protesters began gathering across central Delhi, an extraordinary drama unfolded aboard an Air India flight at Indira Gandhi International Airport. On October 10, Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das, and Ashutosh Ranka, leaders of the CJP, were detained inside the aircraft shortly after it landed. They were released only after each furnished a Rs.50,000 bond with sureties and undertook to maintain peace for a year. The stratagem was laid bare: prevent the organisers from reaching the protest site, disrupt the mobilisation, and entangle them in legalities using preventive detention provisions.

Near Jantar Mantar, the scenes were horrific: security personnel pounced on protesters, overpowered their resistance, bundled them into waiting buses, and transported them to undisclosed locations, releasing them hours later in distant parts of the city. Undeterred, protesters returned to the site, braving police brutality and repeated detention. Thousands of cameras captured the scenes for posterity. The footage left the police with no plausible pretext to claim that the protest was not peaceful.

The government subsequently withdrew Jantar Mantar’s designation as a protest site. In a democracy, the very need to confine public protest to a designated pocket should be cause for shame. Yet, like so many other undemocratic practices, this restriction had become normalised. With Jantar Mantar no longer available, protests could be pushed to distant locations, out of public view. The strategy was not merely to disperse a demonstration, but to render dissent invisible.

On October 13, the Delhi Police arrested CJP leaders Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka for allegedly trespassing at Jantar Mantar and raising slogans. A magistrate recorded that they had been apprehended at a site that was “no longer a designated protest site” and remanded them to five days of judicial custody following their preventive arrest.

On October 16, the CJP called for a “Lehra Do Tiranga” march at Connaught Place. After police denied permission, Abhijeet Dipke and All India Students’ Association president Neha Bora were preventively detained before they could reach the protest; hundreds of supporters nevertheless staged flash protests with the tricolour. Bora was picked up at Mandi House and served with a notice by a Special Executive Magistrate requiring a Rs.10,000 bond with a surety to keep the peace pending an inquiry. On October 23, the Delhi High Court declined to intervene, citing material before the magistrate, including three General Diary entries, six FIRs against Bora and recordings.

Six FIRs. This is what “entangling the leaders in a web” looks like in practice. One incident may be a law-and-order matter. Six raise a more troubling question: is the legal process being used to burden and contain a protest leader?

A peace bond is not a conviction but a preventive measure, imposed without a finding of guilt. Bora was required to furnish a Rs.10,000 personal bond with one surety to maintain peace while the inquiry proceeded. That inquiry is itself a burden: appearing before authorities, engaging lawyers and living under suspicion, without any finding of guilt. The process becomes pure punishment.

The same logic underlies the preventive arrests of Das and Ranka, the detention of Dipke and Bora before they did anything, and the accumulation of FIRs. The prejudiced handling of Das and Ranka’s sureties in full public glare just to prolong their custody was abominable. None of these measures require the state to secure a conviction; each exacts a cost in time, money, liberty, and peace of mind—and can be repeated.

The courts

The state’s strategy depends on a particular behaviour from the courts: that they will not look behind the label. If the label says “preventive”, “breach of peace”, or “unauthorised assembly”, the court asks only whether the procedure was followed, and not whether the pretext is real. That is the way the courts behaved right from the lowest to the highest while dealing with citizens’ grievances and the state’s overtures.

The Delhi High Court’s order shows that dynamic, and also its limits. The court declined to quash the notice, but directed that the material relied on be supplied to Bora, and flagged the question of whether Section 135 of the BNSS contemplates a bond at the threshold or only during the inquiry. The order is not a finding that Bora is guilty, and she remains free to challenge the proceedings at a later stage. Bora rightly declared that she will not sign the bond.

AISA chief Neha Bora is detained by the police during a protest at Mandi House in New Delhi on October 16, 2026, demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged irregularities in the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.
| Photo Credit:
ARUN SHARMA/PTI

But set it alongside the Supreme Court’s Sunday sitting. A court that issues platitudes that the police must follow the law has not done what the moment asks, which is to examine whether the system as a whole is being used for purposes other than those the law names. A court need not be complicit to be complicit in effect. When it declines to look at the pretext, when it treats each notice, remand, and FIR as a separate event with its own procedural history, it ratifies the pattern that links them. Every individual order can be defended. The sum of them cannot.

Why fear has a threshold

The government’s mistake is its theory of fear: that if a little prosecution deters some protest, more prosecution will deter more. But fear depends on punishment being selective. When arrests become routine and neighbours, students, teachers and elected representatives are all detained, the stigma of arrest diminishes. A summons that once inspired terror becomes an inconvenience, even a badge of defiance. The state must then escalate repression to sustain the same deterrent, further eroding its legitimacy.

India has seen this dynamic before. The Emergency (1975-77), with opposition leaders jailed and the press censored, ended in the government’s electoral defeat. Bhagat Singh’s trial, intended to crush a revolutionary movement, became a platform for its message. The farm law protests endured barricades, criminal cases, and accusations of being “anti-national” before the laws had to be repealed. Sri Lanka in 2022, Bangladesh in 2024, and Nepal in 2025 offer different contexts in which crackdowns on young protesters helped turn grievance into mass mobilisation and political upheaval. These cases are not identical, and India is not Nepal. The narrower lesson is that repression beyond the limits of public tolerance can expand, rather than contain, the constituency of dissent.

The boomerang

Each misstep by the government risks strengthening the movement. Das and Ranka’s arrests made headlines; the peace bond proceedings against Bora turned her case into a national issue, repeatedly bringing electoral roll fairness back into public debate. The October 16 flash protests, with hundreds carrying the tricolour, exposed the government’s symbolic dilemma: confronting protesters waving the national flag undermines its claim to embody the nation. In a digitally connected society, detentions, notices, and court orders are filmed, circulated, and scrutinised within hours, making it far harder to isolate dissenters.

This is not a prediction of victory. Prolonged cases exhaust activists, and the threat of arrest deters others. But repression has limits: the government must choose between engagement and escalation, the latter risking further damage to its legitimacy. The courts face a parallel choice: treat each notice and remand as an isolated technical matter or examine the wider pattern and prevent preventive laws from becoming instruments of punishment for dissent. The first approach risks normalising repression; the second would affirm the constitutional purpose of judicial review.

The bottom line: both the government and the courts must understand that the lawfare has never succeeded in taming people’s resolve.

Anand Teltumbde is a civil rights activist and the author of over 30 books. He is the former CEO of Petronet India Ltd and a professor at IIT Kharagpur and the Goa Institute of Management.

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