A Rally Refused Is Still a Rally
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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By Sunil Garodia
First publised on 2026-10-09 14:37:50
About the Author
Editor-in-Chief of indiacommentary.com. Current Affairs analyst and political commentator. Author of Cyber Scams in India, Digital Arrest, The Money Trap and The Human Hack
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The Delhi administration has refused permission for the Cockroach Janta Party's rally at Jantar Mantar on 10 October. It has also imposed an order under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita across the New Delhi district, asked businesses to close earlier than usual and, according to the Times of India, ordered mobile internet suspended within four kilometres of Kartavya Path, a radius nearly triple the 1.5 kilometres used on 2 October. The organisers say the protest will go ahead. On earlier occasions people kept arriving despite barricades and detentions, which lends the claim more credibility than the administration can have wished.
That is the practical difficulty with the refusal. A rally that is going ahead in any case is one the state can either help to shape, through an agreed time, route and marshalling, or contest on every street leading to it, and the administration has chosen the second course. A gathering of uncertain size becomes an enforcement operation whose scale will itself be the story. Whatever the party's true strength, which the reports do not establish, a protest that is permitted and policed makes a smaller story than one that brings metro closures and suspended connectivity to the centre of the capital. The AAP and the Indian Youth Congress, already part of the agitation on this demand, have meanwhile been handed a grievance they did not need to manufacture.
The law does not forbid the administration from acting before violence occurs, and none of the leading judgments says that a refusal of permission is unconstitutional in itself. Himmat Lal Shah (1973) accepts that public meetings may be regulated, while rejecting a discretion to refuse them at will. Ramlila Maidan (2012) considers the limits of police action against a peaceful gathering. Anuradha Bhasin (2020) requires restrictions on internet access to rest on material facts, to be proportionate and to be open to review. The question, therefore, is whether the administration has shown that each of its measures was necessary and proportionate to a credible risk. Its best fact is the stone-pelting at Connaught Place in July, in which an officer was injured. That is a real concern, but it was attributed to unidentified persons at an earlier protest, and a court would ask what material ties it to this rally and why narrower steps, aimed at those who actually cause trouble, would not have sufficed.
A proportionate response called for the administration to consider permission with conditions on hours, numbers and route, reserving enforcement for those who breached them, before opting for a blanket refusal. The reports do not show that it did. Allowing the rally under enforceable conditions would have left the administration with a stronger legal position and a smaller political problem than the one it now faces. The test for tomorrow is whether the measures prevent disorder or merely replace a manageable rally with an unmanageable one.
