Illegal Entry In Prohibited Place Is Not Patriotism
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 2026-10-13 15:36:03
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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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Abhijeet Dipke has spent a video answering an accusation that nobody made. Had hoisting the national flag become a violation of the law, he asked, and whoever thinks so, he added, is a traitor. It is a fine performance in the genre of the heroic reply to a charge sheet that exists only in the replier's imagination. The Delhi Police have not said the tricolour is an offence, no court has said it, and no report of this morning's detentions says it. What the footage Dipke himself circulated shows, according to PTI, is Saurav Das, Ashutosh Ranka and their companions climbing over a locked gate into Jantar Mantar, a site that an official notice had denotified as a protest venue only the day before. They were detained for the climb, and the flag, which came later, is a prop that Dipke is now trying to promote to the role of defendant.
The manoeuvre is transparent. A man held for unlawful entry into a closed place has a poor story, whereas a man held for loving his country has a magnificent one, so the party's task is to make the public read the second story over the first. Raise the flag after clearing the gate, shout "Bharat Mata ki Jai" from inside the barrier, and then ask the nation how a patriot can possibly be detained. The answer is that he can be detained for the gate, and the order of events is not negotiable, because the entry precedes the flag, and unfurling a tricolour does not retroactively make lawful what was done to get it there.
Dipke's own vocabulary is the best evidence against him. His post announced that cockroaches with the Tiranga had sneaked into Jantar Mantar, and it is a revealing verb. Nobody sneaks into a place he is entitled to walk into. The party's founder has conceded in a single word the very proposition that his follow-up video spends several minutes denying, and one wonders whether anyone in the CJP reads its leader's posts before the leader records the next one.
The charge of treason that he flings at his critics deserves no better. Calling people traitors because they observe that a trespass is a trespass is not an argument but a substitute for one, and it comes from a man whose party would be the first to cry foul if the same standard were applied to it. Desh prem and desh droh are not the only two positions in this dispute. There is a third, much less glamorous one, which holds that a person may love his country, carry its flag, and still answer to its law for the gate he scaled to bring the flag in.
The CJP rose quickly on the claim that it was the lawful party in a quarrel with an institution accused of irregularity. That claim has a shelf life, and it expires the moment the party asks for exemption from the rules it demands that others obey. Patriotism was never a licence to enter closed places, and a movement that cannot tell the difference between its love of the country and its obligations under the country's law will find that the public, which was generous in giving its support, is quite capable of asking for it back.
