The People’s March: How Jantar Mantar Defied the Tear Gas, the Internet Blackout, and the Government’s New Bill to Criminalise Dissent

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The People’s March: How Jantar Mantar Defied the Tear Gas, the Internet Blackout, and the Government’s New Bill to Criminalise Dissent

On July 20, the crowd at Jantar Mantar did not merely demand a minister’s resignation or compensation for NEET victims. It dismantled the fear that the BJP regime had so meticulously constructed — and, in doing so, reawakened a democracy that many had declared clinically dead.

Throughout the day, tear gas shells punctuated the air around Jantar Mantar. People ran sideways, their eyes burning, yet no one left the ground. Police provided no comprehensive data on how many shells were fired; videos surfaced in fragments on social media, but the state’s silence became its own testimony. The choking smoke failed to do what the government has grown accustomed to: scatter a crowd into submission. Instead, it pushed the crowd closer together.

The internet, that nervous system of modern dissent, was severed. For hours, not a single live broadcast could be made from the area. Volunteers walked four kilometres on foot just to find a sliver of network and upload clips that told the nation what was unfolding. A drone camera panned over a sea of humanity — a sight that even the most sycophantic TV studio could not ignore. By noon, the crowd had swelled so enormously that Metro stations were forced to shut their gates. The capital witnessed something it had long forgotten: a people’s assembly, organic, un-bought, and terrifying to those who rule through manufactured consent.

The Bill That Never Was (For That Day, At Least)

On the very day the streets filled, the government had planned to introduce the ‘Prevention of Insult to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026’. The bill, as reported in The Hindu, makes it a punishable offence — with up to three years of imprisonment — if any person “obstructs or disrupts” the singing of Vande Mataram. The provision is a textbook example of the BJP’s legislative craft: weaponise a patriotic ritual to create a permanent legal muzzle. It is not about honouring the nation. It is about giving the police a ready-made pretext to lodge false cases, to pick up anyone who dissents under the cover of an insult to the motherland. The law seeks to plant a fresh spine of fear in a citizenry that was beginning to show signs of movement.

Yet, on July 20, the bill could not be tabled. The people outside Parliament had, with their mere presence, jammed the legislative machinery. The irony is as sharp as a lathi: a bill meant to coerce ‘national honour’ through fear was silenced by the very people it sought to intimidate. The crowd had refused to accept that going to jail for three years was an acceptable price for singing a song under duress.

The Architecture of Fear: From the Anthem Order to Vande Mataram

This is not the first time an elected dispensation has tried to police patriotism through judicial or legislative overreach. In 2016, a Supreme Court bench of Justices Dipak Misra and Amitava Roy, in the Shyam Narayan Chouksey v. Union of India case, made it compulsory to play the national anthem in cinema halls and mandated that all patrons must stand. The order was dressed in the language of “constitutional patriotism”, but it rapidly descended into farce: disabled persons were heckled, couples were subjected to vigilante outrage, and cinema exits became interrogation chambers. It took eighteen months of absurdity — and a sharp rise in harassment — for the same bench to dilute its own order in January 2018, clarifying that standing was respect enough and not singing did not amount to an insult. That brief era of compulsory anthem-worship exposed the state’s addiction to using sacred symbols as a tool of social control. It was a pilot project. The 2026 Vande Mataram bill is its full-blown, three-year-jail-term sequel.

The pattern is unmistakable: identify a national symbol, attach a criminal penalty, and arm the police with a permanent suspicion. A whispered complaint that someone “disrupted” Vande Mataram becomes a ticket to prison. No evidence needed, just a flickering doubt. This is how a democracy is hollowed out — not by tanks, but by turning every singing of a song into a potential crime scene.

A Table of Fear: How the State Manufactures Obedience

Instrument of Fear	Example	Actual Outcome
Internet shutdown	Network jammed at Jantar Mantar on July 20	Videos delayed but public resolve amplified; footage reached citizens after hours of persistence
Tear gas shelling	Protesters targeted without comprehensive disclosure of ammunition used	Visuals of resilience spread widely; the state’s violence exposed
Patriotic criminal legislation	Prevention of Insult to National Honour (Amendment) Bill, 2026 — 3 years for obstructing Vande Mataram	Bill stalled on the day of the protest; public defiance created political cost
Compulsory national anthem order	Supreme Court order of 2016 making anthem mandatory in cinemas	Wave of harassment; order modified in 2018 after immense civic pressure
National Security Act (NSA)	Sonam Wangchuk detained for 170 days for organising peaceful climate protests	Wangchuk became a symbol of resistance; his presence at Jantar Mantar inspired thousands

The People Turn Against Their Own Silence

The crowd that trudged to Jantar Mantar was not just opposing the government. It was repudiating its own past. For years, the same public — swaddled in the narcotic of religious nationalism — had watched in silence as their rights were crushed. Inflation bit into their kitchens; education became a marketplace of leaks and despair; journalists were thrown out of studios, their YouTube channels demonetised or pulled down; activists were locked away under the unforgettable acronym UAPA. And the public stood with the government. The same people who had queued in serpentine lines during demonetisation, swallowing the pain as a nationalist virtue, now queued outside Metro stations — so many that the Delhi Metro had to suspend services. The line that had once been a picture of helplessness became a portrait of defiance.

Students, fathers, mothers, the elderly, the young — they came from every housing society whose WhatsApp groups had long been polluted by uncles and aunties branding their own children as “Chinese agents” and “Pakistani agents”. Ravish Kumar’s wry suggestion — “Share this video in your housing society’s WhatsApp group and enjoy the reactions of those uncles and aunties” — captures the bitter comedy of a society waking up. Those who had gleefully parroted the godi media’s script suddenly saw their own children among the marching mass. The ideological uniform of the “bhakt” was being shed on the streets of Delhi.

For years, a theory had circulated in government think-tanks and WhatsApp forward mills: a people once beaten into submission never rise again. Jantar Mantar on July 20 overturned that thesis. The crowd proved that a society may appear dead for a long, long time, but only the people have the capacity to resurrect themselves.

The Government’s Jolt: Closed Gates and an Ageist Taunt

The government was caught unawares. Parliament’s gates had to be closed. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s convoy was reported to have left the complex well before 3 PM. That afternoon, the Prime Minister addressed the House during the monsoon session’s first day. Outside, tens of thousands were chanting against his government. Inside, he chose to speak about a space-startup of young scientists — and then, without naming Rahul Gandhi, sneered at the 56-year-old “youth” leader of the opposition. “I am not referring to any 56-year-old youth,” he said, mocking Gandhi’s age while projecting himself as the fresh, modern figure. Had the Prime Minister mentioned his own 75 years, the uncomfortable memory of the “margdarshak mandal” — the informal council of retired veterans guiding him — would have resurfaced. So the jibe was aimed at a rival’s birth certificate. When a nation’s most pressing questions go unanswered, a septuagenarian prime minister chooses to quip about a 56-year-old’s age, as if Rahul Gandhi were 100 and Narendra Modi were 28. The surreal inversion was a message to the crowds outside: you are so inconsequential that I will not even acknowledge you; I will play a number game with my opponent’s age.

The Minister’s Photograph and the Zero Conviction Rate

While the protests brewed, Education Minister Dharamendra Pradhan had tweeted a photograph — taken on a Sunday — with the second-ranked NEET topper. The optics were spectacularly tone-deaf. NEET aspirants had died by suicide after a series of paper leaks. Official records, compiled from RTI responses and reports by the National Crime Records Bureau, indicate that in the last ten years, 152 exam papers have been leaked, and the conviction rate stands at a staggering zero. Against this backdrop, the minister beaming beside a topper was not a gesture of empathy. It was a calculated dismissal: the examination is over, the matter is closed, now smile for the camera.

But the students and their parents did not smile. They filled the roads of Delhi and Dehradun — where Rahul Gandhi’s parallel rally saw an even larger youth presence. The government, which had refused to listen to the students in court or on the streets, finally found itself forced to listen when it couldn’t move.

The Media’s Linguistic Poverty

Pro-government television channels performed a remarkable verbal acrobatics. Unable to label the crowd “anti-national” — the faces were too clearly Indian, too middle-class, too Hindu — they retreated to a vocabulary of chaos: “kuch”, “bawal”, “hungama”. A peaceful assembly of citizens was reduced to a “march towards Parliament” as if a mob were storming the legislature. The media that had spent a decade smearing every protest as a conspiracy, a Congress toolkit, a tukde-tukde gang scheme, found its arsenal empty. It could not call these people Chinese agents — because many of them were the very households that had voted for the BJP in 2014 and 2019. The linguistic crisis of the godi media on that day was a confession: it has lost the capacity to describe democracy.

Destiny’s Revenge and a People Transformed

Ravish Kumar once remarked that destiny had taken a ruthless revenge on the people. The crowd that had been fed a diet of communal polarisation and empty nationalism was now standing in front of Parliament, demanding accountability. The march was not just against Modi or Pradhan; it was against the self that had been voluntarily anaesthetised. The young man who sat cross-legged in front of a policeman, offering his head and chanting “hit me with your lathi”, was not performing bravery; he was exercising a newfound fearlessness. Sonam Wangchuk — who had been jailed under the NSA for 170 days — walked alongside them, his presence a quiet testimony that state terror can be survived and converted into courage. Ninety-year-old Farooq Abdullah of the Samajwadi Party was there too, linking generations of dissent.

The government, late at night, was forced to open a channel of dialogue. CJP spokesperson Saurav Das tweeted a photograph from inside J.P. Nadda’s residence, contradicting the planted news that the BJP had refused to meet the protesters. Three demands were placed before the government: the release of Sonam Wangchuk, the resignation of Dharamendra Pradhan, and one crore rupees in compensation for each NEET aspirant who had ended their life. The very act of negotiation punctured the myth that this was a fringe agitation orchestrated by political rivals.

What happens next will unfold over time. The government will try to track down the participants, to enter their homes, to file cases, to send a new wave of fear. But something irreversible has occurred. The people have tasted their own power. The memory of July 20 — of walking without fear, of seeing a stranger become a comrade — will linger for decades. In moments of despair, when democracy is again trampled, when elections are won through algorithmic manipulation and not trust, they will remember that once they rose, and that they can rise again.

Criticisms

• - Tear gas shells were fired on peaceful protesters, and comprehensive information on their use was withheld by the Delhi Police.
• - Mobile internet and network services were deliberately jammed in the Jantar Mantar area to suppress live coverage and citizen documentation.
• - A bill to criminalise obstruction or disruption of Vande Mataram singing with up to three years’ imprisonment was scheduled for introduction, converting a patriotic song into a tool for lodging false cases.
• - In 2016, a Supreme Court bench made the national anthem compulsory in cinemas, enabling widespread harassment and creating a climate of patriotic policing.
• - The government is accused of misusing the National Security Act to detain a Gandhian climate activist for 170 days for organising peaceful protests.
• - Education Minister Dharamendra Pradhan is perceived to have trivialised the deaths of NEET aspirants by posting a photograph with the second topper while systemic paper-leak failures remain unaddressed.
• - The Prime Minister is noted to have mocked the age of the Leader of Opposition in his parliamentary address on the day of a mass protest, instead of acknowledging the public’s grievances.
• - Pro-government media channels are observed to have deliberately downplayed the democratic significance of the gathering, reducing a peaceful assembly to a law-and-order disturbance.
• - The education ministry’s failure to secure a single conviction in 152 reported cases of exam paper leaks over a decade is regarded as a deliberate neglect of the youth’s future.
• - The government is accused of changing the Delhi Police Commissioner abruptly and using signals rather than engaging directly with the protesters’ legitimate demands.
• - Election promises and religious-nationalist rhetoric are seen to have been deployed to pacify a population whose economic and educational rights have been steadily eroded.