Over roughly fifty years, official inquiries and court findings have documented repeated use of batons, water cannon, and tear gas by police forces across the country — with Delhi Police drawing particular scrutiny — against protesters, low-income city residents, and women. The Shah Commission, convened in the wake of the 1975–77 Emergency, examined a 1976 episode at Turkman Gate in which police fired on residents who had gathered to protest the demolition of their homes; its findings stated that directing law enforcement to advance the agenda of a ruling party ranks among the most dependable routes by which the rule of law is eroded.
A crowd made up largely of young women gathered at India Gate in December 2012, demanding accountability in a gang-rape case, and police responded by deploying batons, tear gas, and water cannon against those assembled. On multiple occasions, rulings from the Supreme Court have found police conduct directed at students to constitute an overreach of authority, with directives issued for disciplinary proceedings against the officers involved.
Custody rape complaints have been directed at the force with enough regularity that the Verma Committee judged the matter warranting a provision under which a senior officer faces imprisonment should a subordinate be found to have carried out such an assault.
Demonstrations drawing in university students, younger residents, and those active in political organising unfolded in the nation's capital over a weekend, directed at the Modi administration's conduct of the electoral process. On video, officers were seen subjecting women to unwanted physical contact and using force against men — a group that included journalists and a parliamentarian who had been taken into custody beforehand. Accounts from a number of those detained — predominantly younger individuals — described physical abuse at the hands of those holding them.
Under India's constitutional arrangement, the Delhi Police force operates within a chain of command that runs through the Union Home Ministry, currently led by Amit Shah. On 10 October, roughly 41,000 security personnel — among them armed paramilitary border forces — were stationed across the national capital ahead of a demonstration organised by the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and supported by opposition parties and civil society groups, a deployment that Congress MP Jairam Ramesh characterised as turning the city into a fortress.
Across a span of two days, as many as 7,000 people are said to have been taken into custody. Several of those people were dropped off after nightfall on the city's outskirts, only to be taken into custody the next morning when they arrived at Jantar Mantar — the designated protest zone near Parliament House.
On a Sunday — 11 October — the court convened in an out-of-schedule session, issuing orders against unlawful detentions and calling for unimpeded access for both legal practitioners and members of the press. Within hours, the force proceeded with the detention of student activists after nightfall — a practice the penal code permits only under specific defined conditions — with accounts indicating that both male and female detainees were handled roughly before being transported in a vehicle running without lights and without female officers present, arrangements that fell outside the protections the Supreme Court has set out for women in custody.
Formal complaints lodged with the Crime Branch document allegations by a minimum of three women in journalism who reported harassment by police officers, while staff from the independent outlet Maktoob described being encircled by individuals presenting themselves as press who directed religiously targeted abuse at them as uniformed officers remained present without intervening. Footage circulating online captured a member of the uniformed police force sexually assaulting a woman.
Figures from the opening day placed the number of detained journalists at a floor of 20, with subsequent tallies pushing that count above 35. Incidents involving assaulted journalists, confiscated phones, and erased footage have been catalogued by the Committee to Protect Journalists, while the Free Speech Collective has moved through the courts with a contempt petition.
At a Press Club of India gathering, two of the three Citizens for Justice and Peace leaders who had been freed on 11 October — under a condition barring them from disrupting public order for the next twelve months — addressed journalists, stating their view that the authorities were taking action against the very population they are meant to serve. Armed personnel from Delhi Police and the Central Reserve Police Force's Rapid Action Force took up positions around the Club during the press conference, with a number of officers stepping inside bearing weapons — an occurrence the institution had never before recorded.
The following day, close to 150 members of the press assembled at the Press Club to take part in a march over the detention of their fellow journalists, with dozens speaking at a subsequent meeting to say they had been physically handled, loaded onto police vehicles, and held by authorities even after producing their press credentials.
Brittas, who holds a parliamentary seat aligned with the Marxist bloc, told reporters that Central Reserve Police Force personnel forcibly moved him approximately 50 metres while he was speaking with journalists, restrained him in a seat, applied pressure to his throat, and subsequently transported him along with others to a location he was not informed of, before leaving him at the side of a road. A three-wheeled auto-rickshaw carried him to Ram Manohar Lohia Hospital, where he received medical attention.
Following reports that advocate Shadan Farasat had his arms and legs grabbed and his shirt torn during a courtroom altercation, and that a woman advocate sustained a dislocated shoulder in the same incident, the Delhi High Court Bar Association directed its members to wear black ribbons in response. A formal request for an independent inquiry was put forward by the Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association.
A joint petition carrying the signatures of eleven opposition INDIA bloc figures — among them Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge and party leader Rahul Gandhi — was submitted to the Chief Justice of India, Surya Kant, after a prior request for a meeting went unaccepted on the grounds that the matters in question were before the courts. A procession drawing together all opposition parties — described as numbering upward of one hundred thousand participants — was brought to a halt roughly 500 metres before reaching the Supreme Court, with four FIRs (first information reports, the formal mechanism under Indian law for initiating a criminal case) subsequently registered against the organising leaders.
The following day, police declared that Jantar Mantar had been removed from the list of approved demonstration venues, with Ramlila Ground and two peripheral grounds designated as the permitted locations going forward. Contesting the directive, Gandhi and fellow organisers declared their intention to demonstrate at any point where they were stopped, while pointing to a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that had upheld the right to peaceful assembly at Jantar Mantar as one that authorities could not restrict without justification.
Under Article 19, the rights to express oneself freely and to gather peacefully are guaranteed, while Article 21 extends protection to both life and personal liberty.
Protests over disputed election results — and the official response to them — drew scrutiny from global press-freedom bodies, including the Committee to Protect Journalists, Reporters Without Borders, and the International Press Institute, each of which raised formal objections over how journalists were treated during the unrest. Kharge's comment — that the nation's democratic foundations were being suppressed rather than upheld — spread across social media platforms alongside visual documentation of the security response, including both photographs and video footage.
