“Don’t Waste Our Time, We Won’t Watch Videos”: When the Supreme Court Shut Its Eyes to Delhi’s Pellet Guns and Plainclothes Violence
On 22 July, as lawyers pleaded for an urgent hearing on the police brutality that had unfolded on the streets of Delhi over the previous days, the Chief Justice of India is reported to have responded, “Don’t waste our time. We don’t want to see videos.” It was a sentence that revealed more than any judgment could. The highest court of the land was telling the country that the state’s violence against its own young citizens was not worth its time. What follows is a detailed look at those two days of unprecedented police action, the government’s wall of denial, and the chilling silence of the institutions that are supposed to be the last line of defence for democratic protest.
The Return of Pellet Guns in the Heart of Lutyens’ Delhi
On 20 July, thousands of young people, many of them students, had gathered at Jantar Mantar and later attempted to march towards Parliament. The protest was largely peaceful, but what occurred next was anything but. In a report published in The Hindu on 22 July, journalist Vijaita Singh reported that the Delhi Police had used pellet guns on the civilian protesters. That would be a first outside the conflict theatre of Jammu and Kashmir. The police immediately denied the allegation, but denial alone cannot settle a matter of such gravity. Pellet guns fire metal pellets that can penetrate the skin and destroy the eye, causing partial or total blindness. The memory of Kashmir in 2016 is still raw: according to the Jammu and Kashmir State Human Rights Commission, 1,126 people were injured by pellet guns that year, and official data tabled in Parliament confirmed that 17 people had been killed. Then Chief Minister Mehbooba Mufti told the state assembly that over 6,000 people had been injured, and that 54 individuals had suffered some form of eye damage, many permanently.
If this arsenal was indeed deployed against teenagers and young adults on the lawns of Jantar Mantar, the risk of blinding a generation of the country’s future was real. Yet the Delhi Police’s one-line dismissal has been accepted as sufficient by a large section of the media and, more troublingly, by the judiciary that refused to even look at the evidence.
Shock Batons – A Taser in Disguise
Alongside pellet guns, multiple videos that went viral showed a young girl being struck with a baton that appeared to deliver an electric shock. This device, known as a shock baton, carries a mild current that can stun a person into submission. Vijaita Singh’s report also mentioned that both the pellet gun and the shock baton are standard parts of the Rapid Action Force’s anti-riot gear. The police again issued a denial, but the images are unmistakable. The use of such weapons on unarmed protesters is not crowd control – it is punitive violence intended to terrorise a movement into silence.
The Unidentified Men in Plain Clothes – A Private Army on the Streets?
Perhaps the most disturbing evidence to emerge from 20 and 21 July is the presence of a large number of men in civilian clothes who were seen walking alongside Delhi Police personnel, carrying the same polycarbonate sticks, and assaulting protesters with total impunity. In multiple videos, these unidentified individuals can be seen striking, kicking, and dragging young people while uniformed policemen stand by or even join in. One widely circulated clip shows a young man in a check shirt being repeatedly beaten after being dragged by a man in a green T-shirt, who appears to be operating with the full knowledge of two policemen nearby. No one stops him. He walks away as if he had just finished a mundane errand.
These men wore no nameplates, no badges, and no sign of any official affiliation. The Supreme Court’s own guidelines in the D.K. Basu case (1996) mandate that every police officer interacting with the public must wear a clear and visible nameplate on the uniform. The presence of these nameless, uniformless men violates those directives and transforms law enforcement into something closer to a vigilante squad. When protesters began calling them “goondas,” the Delhi Police did not even issue a denial on those specific posts. That silence invites a chilling question: were these men deployed by the police itself to provoke violence and give the authorities a pretext for a lathi charge? The parallels with the private armies of totalitarian regimes are not hyperbolic; they are being voiced by the very people who lived through those hours of chaos.
Brutality on Camera – Lathi on the Defenceless
The videos of the lathi charge reveal a pattern of disproportionate and sadistic force. In one clip, a young man sits on the ground with his hands folded in a gesture of surrender. A policeman hits him on the head anyway. Standard police training prohibits striking the head with a lathi; the weapon is meant to be aimed at the limbs. Yet, according to a report in The Indian Express, a majority of the injured suffered head wounds. Other footage shows policemen throwing stones at a group of children, something no riot control manual can justify. And in a twist that would be farcical if it were not so sinister, some videos appear to show police vehicles being smashed – leading to speculation that the police themselves damaged their own property to frame the protesters for vandalism.
This is not a handful of rogue constables. This is an institutional descent into lawlessness, sanctioned by a government that has long treated any mass demonstration as a nuisance to be crushed. When a peaceful protest is deliberately transformed into a riot, the fault lies not with the youth who ask for their rights but with the state that has lost all sense of accountability.
The Police Denials and the Missing Press Conference
From 20 July afternoon until well into 22 July, the Delhi Police did not hold a single press conference. The only official communication consisted of dismissive tweets pasted under viral videos, labelling them “fake news” and “misleading.” This strategy was exposed as hollow when Sheikh Irshad Mansoori, a protester whose image of injury had been denounced as fabricated by the police, was later confirmed by The Hindu to be hospitalised and receiving treatment. The doctors at the hospital initially issued denials too, but in an atmosphere where everything can be “managed,” only an independent medical board could have restored credibility. It never materialised.
A regime that relies on flat denials instead of transparent inquiry is a regime that knows the truth is too dangerous to acknowledge. The refusal to hold a press conference was not a logistical failure; it was a tactic. When the cameras are switched off, the lathis can strike harder.
The Judiciary That Chose Not to See
All of this brings us back to the Supreme Court’s refusal to entertain the urgent petition. This is the same court that has shown remarkable alacrity when dealing with certain other matters. But when lawyers produced video evidence of state violence against citizens, the response was to rebuke them for wasting the court’s time. The veteran Supreme Court lawyer Sanjay Hegde was reminded of a far more empathetic moment: during the Mandal Commission turmoil, Justice K.N. Singh had turned to the then Attorney General Soli Sorabjee and said, “Mr Attorney, these are our children dying on the roads.” Today’s top court, in stark contrast, essentially told the petitioners, “We don’t want to see your videos.” That phrase will be remembered as a moral failure, a point at which the judiciary effectively surrendered its guardian role and signalled to the executive that it could wage war on its own young citizens without any judicial check.
The Protesters’ Resilience – A Leaderless Generation Finds Its Voice
Yet, the streets did not empty. On 21 July, even after the horrific violence of the previous day, thousands gathered again at Connaught Place. Abhijeet Dhavle’s hunger strike at Jantar Mantar continued, joined by Sonam Wangchuk. The COEP Janata Party, the political outfit born out of the frustrations of government job aspirants, stumbled through its own internal contradictions – its spokesperson was removed, its supporters were confused by shifting statements – but the movement itself refused to die. That is because this agitation has become about something larger than any individual leader. The nation’s youth have started to cure themselves of the disease of fear. They have seen how countless elected representatives, even multi-term MPs, have abandoned their opposition platforms and joined the ruling party under the pressure of investigation and prosecution. The lesson has been learned: the people are now their own opposition. A movement without a permanent leader is much harder to co-opt.
When Rahul Gandhi Sat Outside the Prime Minister’s Residence
Amid this ferment, Rahul Gandhi staged a dramatic dharna outside the gates of the Prime Minister’s residence over the police action. Police had to drag him away, and soon MPs Sanjay Singh and Chandrashekhar Azad joined the attempt. The symbolism was powerful, but the political calculation was obvious. The Opposition, decimated and disoriented after successive electoral setbacks, is trying to reclaim the street. Meanwhile, the BJP has perfected the art of absorbing its adversaries – elected Trinamool Congress MPs joined a paper party with 20 legislators in a single night, and high-profile defectors like Raghav Chadha have demonstrated that no ideological barrier is too strong to cross. Against this backdrop, the real force of accountability is now the anonymous young person who left home to protest, knowing the lathi will fall and the camera will record, but equally knowing that the only way to live is to refuse to be silenced.
A Nation Looted of Dreams
The protest is not just about a particular recruitment policy or an examination paper leak. It is about a deeper rot: a country where a government college no longer promises a quality education, where a poor child’s ticket to advancement has been snatched by a rigged system, and where the state’s answer to every question is the stick and the denial. The current dispensation has ensured that the public discourse remains drowned in religious frenzy and temple-mosque polemics. For some, that intoxication may be enough. But eventually, the hangover will set in, and the realisation will dawn that while the nation was busy hating its minorities, its young were being robbed of their future. The lathis cannot erase that truth. The Supreme Court’s dismissal cannot hide the videos. The question is not whether the movement will fade. The question is how much of a nation’s soul has already been looted while its guardians looked the other way.
Criticisms
- It must be stated that the Modi government’s totalitarian methods of suppressing peaceful protest have reached a dangerous new threshold.
- It is observed that the Delhi Police’s use of pellet guns and shock batons was authorised in clear violation of international standards on crowd control.
- It is lamented that the Supreme Court’s dismissal of urgent plea on police violence is a grave abdication of its constitutional duty.
- It is noted that plainclothes vigilantes were deployed to assault protesters, a tactic reminiscent of authoritarian regimes, and their identities must be disclosed immediately.
- It is condemned that the police systematically denied every piece of video evidence without any independent inquiry, thereby deepening public mistrust.
- It is regretted that a section of the media reported official denials as fact without pursuing the truth, thereby enabling the state’s cover-up.
- It is asserted that the right to peaceful assembly has been deliberately crushed through excessive force and fabricated charges against young citizens.
- It is charged that the government’s refusal to address the education and employment crisis has pushed an entire generation into a hunger strike and a confrontation with batons.
- It is denounced that the defection of opposition politicians under the pressure of state agencies has left the streets as the only remaining check on power.
- It is further noted that the Chief Justice’s remark “Don’t waste our time” has inflicted irreparable damage on the image of the judiciary as a protector of fundamental rights.
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