When Protest Becomes a Public-Order Problem: India’s Shrinking Space for Dissent

—Susen Kamble, Constitutional Law Researcher; LLM graduate in Constitutional & Administrative Law, National Law Institute University, Bhopal; research focused on judicial independence, democratic backsliding, and comparative constitutional design

A democracy reveals its character not in how it handles agreement, but in how it treats those who gather to object. Protest is where citizenship becomes audible – the moment a grievance stops being private and asks to be heard. How a state answers that moment tells us a great deal about the health of its constitutional order. To see what India’s answer is becoming, it helps to begin not with the present, but with history. This piece argues that two recent protest episodes – the CJP agitation at Jantar Mantar in Delhi and the Ken-Betwa displacement protests in Madhya Pradesh – illustrate a pattern of incremental constitutional erosion: the formal right to dissent is preserved on paper while the practical conditions under which it can be exercised are steadily narrowed.

In colonial India, the state often treated public assembly as a danger before it treated it as a right. That instinct did not disappear at independence; it survives whenever peaceful protest is met first with police control, barricades, and removal rather than constitutional listening.

The current moment in India makes that continuity hard to ignore. The protests associated with the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) (a parody political labelling) accompanied by Ramon Magsaysay Award winner activist Sonam Wangchuk in Delhi, and the Ken-Betwa agitation in Madhya Pradesh, show how a populist state can narrow democratic space without formally abolishing the right to dissent. In both cases, the response has been less about engaging with the grievances than about managing the visibility and cost of protest.

Article 19 of the Constitution of India protects speech, assembly, and association, and the Supreme Court of India has repeatedly recognized that peaceful protest is part of democratic life. The legal point that matters here is that the state may impose reasonable restrictions, but it cannot simply convert dissent into disorder by default.

Providing constitutional protection is not incidental. Protest is one of the principal ways citizens make power answerable in a democracy, especially when formal institutions appear sluggish, unresponsive, or distant. It is also the means by which political grievance becomes visible in public life. When that space is narrowed through policing, the state does not merely regulate conduct, it reshapes the conditions under which citizenship itself is exercised.

Professor Tom Ginsburg and Professor Aziz Huq from University of Chicago help explain why this matters. In How to Lose a Constitutional Democracy, they argue that democratic erosion is rarely sudden. It usually proceeds through a sequence of incremental, legally defensible steps that, taken together, weaken the rights and institutions that make democracy workable.

That framework is useful here because protest suppression often looks ordinary at the level of each incident, even while its cumulative effect is deeply corrosive. A barricade, a dispersal order, a site clearance, a forced hospital transfer, or an official claim that a gathering is merely inconvenient can each be defended in isolation. Together, they can hollow out the constitutional space in which dissent is supposed to operate.

The CJP protest site at Jantar Mantar in the capital city of Delhi illustrates the point. Reports describe heavy policing, barricades, the dismantling of protest structures, tear gas bombs and lathi-charge as protesters gathered around demands linked to alleged examination irregularities and educational reforms including urgent and necessary resignation of the Union Education Minister. The presence of Sonam Wangchuk gave the protest added visibility and traction, but it also exposed the instinct of the state to treat a civic gathering as a security issue.

The Ken-Betwa protests in Madhya Pradesh reveal a similar pattern in a different setting. Here the issue was displacement, compensation, and the treatment of villagers and tribal communities affected by a major river-linking project. Yet the response was again physical removal: police cleared the protest site, and reports said hunger-striking protesters were forcefully shifted to hospitals or sent back to their villages.

Taken together, these episodes show a deeper constitutional problem. Protest is being treated less as a democratic practice and more as an inconvenience to be cleared away. That is not just a matter of policing style. It affects whether citizens can meaningfully use the freedoms of speech and assembly to challenge state power.

This is where Prof. Ginsburg and Prof. Huq become especially valuable. Democratic decline does not require the formal suspension of rights. It can also happen through a steady narrowing of the conditions under which rights can be exercised. If peaceful protesters must expect removal, delay, or intimidation, then the right remains formally alive while becoming practically fragile.

The colonial comparison matters for that reason. British rule often relied on public-order laws to make dissent appear illegitimate, and the legal inheritance of colonial India still shapes the language of control today. The constitutional project after 1947 was supposed to reverse that logic by placing dissent within the democratic order. When current policing practices instead echo the old instinct to suppress gathering first and justify later, the continuity is hard to miss.

Courts have recognized this tension before. The Indian Supreme Court has said that peaceful demonstration is a right of the people and that legitimate dissent is a distinguishing feature of democracy. The Delhi High Court reiterated that peaceful protest and non-violent dissent are natural to the academic environment and that punishing a sit-down protest can be wholly untenable in law. That principle should not be confined to universities. Ironically, the same Delhi High Court declined to entertain a separate petition alleging excessive use of force by Delhi Police against the CJP protesters, reportedly telling the petitioner: ‘Don’t drag the court into all this‘ – a judicial posture that sits uneasily alongside its own affirmation of the right to peaceful protest.

The lesson of the CJP/Wangchuk and Ken-Betwa episodes is not that every protest must be allowed to occupy every space without limit. It is that the state must respond to peaceful dissent with constitutional seriousness, not reflexive containment. The line between regulation and repression is crossed when the first instinct of the state is to disperse, remove, or silence.

The democratic future in India depends in part on whether protest remains legible as a constitutional act. If peaceful assembly is steadily reclassified as a public-order nuisance, then the right to dissent will survive only in theory. A democracy can endure many disagreements, but it cannot survive long if it repeatedly teaches citizens that speaking together is itself a disturbance.

The real constitutional question is not whether India permits protest in the abstract. It is whether the state still treats protest as a democratic practice worth protecting when it becomes inconvenient, disruptive, or politically embarrassing. That is where the health of constitutional democracy is finally tested – not in moments of consensus, but in the willingness of the state to tolerate dissent that it would rather not hear.

Suggested citation: Susen Kamble, When Protest Becomes a Public-Order Problem: India’s Shrinking Space for Dissent, Int’l J. Const. L. Blog, Aug. 22, 2026, at: http://www.iconnectblog.com/when-protest-becomes-a-public-order-problem-indias-shrinking-space-for-dissent/