NEW DELHI: A month before the Republic turns up at India Gate, with all its pomp and glory, people incensed by its attempt to silence their voice marched all over the place, making a bonfire of the wooden barricades that keep them off Rajpath. The mild ones who advocated peace and didn't wish to stoke the fire were soon running for cover as the heavy hand of the state descended on them with round after round of tear gas and lathicharges.

Soon, India Gate was resembling a battleground with fires burning here and there, water on the ground and smoke in the air. But blood and bruises didn't deter the protesters and some of them were back at India Gate by nightfall, setting the stage for another day of uncertainty and confrontation on Monday.

What began as a peaceful protest on a misty Sunday morning gathered storm as the day progressed, ending with a massive clean-up operation by Delhi Police with tear gas, water cannons and lathicharge. There was chaos, anger and confusion as around 10,000 protesters and several cops clashed repeatedly. Police lathicharged the crowd at least 10 times, injuring 65 people (many more didn't report at hospitals). And finally, around 5.30pm, they just went berserk – the policemen and the Rapid Action Force rained lathi blows on everyone coming in their way, including protesters, mediapersons and even families out for a walk.

At least 250 tear gas shells were lobbed and water cannons used as cops chased the protesters all the way from India Gate to ITO, Mandi House and Pragati Maidan. Delhi Police officers said the protest, which was peaceful on Saturday, had been hijacked by some political elements and hooligans who threw stones at regular intervals. Around 78 policemen were injured, including one constable identified as Subhash Tomar who is reported to be critical. Officials said he was beaten up by the violent protestors and is now on ventilator support.

The drama began early in the morning as the protesters began to assemble around 8am. The cops imposed prohibitory orders under section 144 of CrPC in all of New Delhi area and tried sending the protesters to Jantar Mantar and Ramlila Maidan by dragging and pushing them into buses. However, many protesters successfully resisted this and the crowd steadily swelled. Parallel protests took place at 10 Janpath and Jantar Mantar. Even as Metro stations were closed down and barricades put up, people continued to pour into India Gate by walking long distances.

The cops had blocked all access routes early in the morning but there was no stopping the people. Unable to deal with a growing crowd that repeatedly made attempts to breach security, the cops fired tear gas and lathicharged the protesters repeatedly even as the agitators vandalised public property. The protesters were also lathicharged at Jantar Mantar, Rail Bhawan and Mansingh Road.

While a group of JNU students marched into India Gate from Nizamuddin around 11am, other groups made their way in from Ashoka Road. A large group of protesters blocked all traffic on the India Gate C-hexagon near Hyderabad House until cops removed them. Some rowdy elements in this group jumped on top of a police vehicle, breaking the windows and hammering the bonnet with sticks, even as others pleaded with them to stop, horrified. Some protesters gheraoed MP Sandeep Dikshit's car and chased him before he was escorted into the barricaded area of Rajpath.

A few protesters from the youth wing of left parties also tried making their way to Rashtrapati Bhavan through Rafi Marg. Around 200 youngsters, along with Brinda Karat , were forcefully pushed back near Rail Bhavan when the cops used their lathis and sprayed water to disperse the protesters around 12.30pm. But this did not deter the crowds. Women rights group like National Federation of India Women tried yet again to breach security leading to a second lathicharge within an hour.

"They think they will remove us from here but we will not go," said Sheela from Trilokpuri, who along with other women sat on the road causing the traffic to come to a standstill. After this these protesters started to make their way to Ashoka Road which was already reeling under a riot-like situation.

The violence sharply escalated around 5.15pm, with the protesters pelting stones at the police and burning barricades and machans. A Delhi Doordarshan SX4 vehicle was turned over and damaged by an angry mob. Around 5.30pm, Delhi Police ordered a lathicharge and evacuation of people from India Gate.

For the next one hour, the police went on the rampage, hitting anyone in sight, lobbing more than 200 tear gas shells and using water cannons. The protesters, who moved to the roads connecting the India Gate circle, damaged more than 50 vehicles, including 12 DTC buses, and set many vehicles, including a dozen PCR vans and some private vehicles, on fire. Even moving buses with passengers inside were pelted with stones.

Minutes before the lathicharge, special commissioner of police (law and order) Dharmendra Kumar blamed ‘hooligans' for the violence, claiming that unruly elements had ‘hijacked' the peaceful demonstration. Delhi Police in its report to the Union home ministry said that some ‘vested interests' had joined the protesters and were instigating them.

Kumar disclosed that a former chief justice of India will constitute the commission of inquiry which will go into the gangrape incident, lapses by the police and measures to be taken to ensure safety of women in Delhi and other parts of the country.

Kumar also said that if the protesters remained peaceful, the police was willing to take a delegation to the home minister. "What is the purpose of this lawlessness? People should calm down and allow police to work," he added.

Times View

Please, let's give peace a chance

People have the right to protest peacefully in a democracy. This differentiates countries like India from totalitarian regimes like China. However, the way the police have handled the protests in Delhi in the last two days has shown that both the police and government are clueless as to how to deal with spontaneous protests. Instead of recognising what is bringing our children, young girls and boys, to the wind-swept lawns of India Gate, instead of gauging the depth of their anguish born of a horrendous rape that makes the country hang its head in shame, our police and administrators are dealing with the protestors as they would with hired crowds often brought by vested political interests to create mischief.

Sadly, this flawed way of dealing with the protests has created a deep sense of frustration among those protesting, a frustration that is beginning to be expressed in a disturbing resort to violence. It seems unruly elements are now sensing the possibility of exploiting the situation to foment trouble. Any violence will defeat the very purpose why Nirbhaya (the symbolic name TOI has given the courageous girl) is battling for her life: to ensure that she, and others like her, get justice and such violent crimes are not allowed to happen again.

We must recognize the context in which this protest may be going out of control. The police have been guilty of undue use of force on protesters in a bid to get them out of the area around Vijay Chowk. They are being lathicharged, tear-gassed, hit with water cannons, and section 144 has been imposed – the standard operating procedure for dealing with crowds. Are the police to blame for this? Yes , but only partly. This is because they are mandated to prevent unscheduled protestors from climbing Raisina Hill and reaching Rashtrapati Bhavan to convey their anguish to the President. When MPs march as a body to give the President a memorandum of demand, the police are informed in advance and they let the MPs through. But they are at a loss when things don't go by the book and representatives of a spontaneous movement seek to do the same.

This is where political intervention and wisdom are required. Senior government leaders should tell the police to negotiate with the protestors for a manageable group of representatives to go and meet the President. Better still, the leaders should do it themselves. As public anger grew in the days after the rape, not one of them came to talk to the young girls and boys. So what if they had faced some anger? If a brave leader – say, Rahul Gandhi , who is said to be a youth icon – had reached the spot, megaphone in hand, and told the protestors that he shared the same anguish, the same anger and had the same determination to ensure zero tolerance for any kind of misbehaviour towards women, the situation might have been defused by now. Instead, the situation is now in danger of descending into violence.

But it is not – as some are saying – because political parties have joined the protests (who would channelize popular anger in a democracy if not organised political outfits?). The real reason is that the protestors feel they are banging their heads against a wall. There is no one to listen to them. The government has failed to recognise that these protests are signs of the people's resolve to not remain mute spectators to administrative apathy and poor governance. This is not the first time that the government and the police have been panicked into hasty action on protesters. Baba Ramdev's rally at the Ramlila grounds earlier in the year saw a similarly knee-jerk reaction. Metro stations were also shut down when Arvind Kejriwal and others had called for a dharna at the PM's residence demanding the Jan Lokpal bill. It was the same on Sunday when four Metro stations were sealed and section 144 was imposed in the India Gate area.

In this case, as in the earlier ones, the protests were peaceful till things took an ugly turn on Sunday evening. Nobody was physically attacking anybody, public or private property was not being damaged, and there was no violence. A few young boys and girls throwing bottles or stones don't make a protest dangerous. So why the insistence on breaking it up and clearing the area? Often the police response is that no permission was sought for the protest. When protests are against police inaction, does it not seem strange that we must seek the permission of the police before protesting? Second, the notion of seeking permission might make sense when it is an organized protest, but where in the question of seeking permission when people spontaneously turn up to register their anger? Who is expected to seek permission? Our government and police must get used to the idea that in the era of social media many protests will be spontaneous and without clear leaders who can seek and get permission. The response cannot be to just put them down. As long as protests are peaceful, they must be allowed.

That said, the protestors must keep their protest peaceful and refrain from any violence against the police or damage to public property. They should not give the police any excuse to resort to violent crowd-control measures. They must show their anger constructively and bring to the authorities concrete and reasonable demands. TOI has repeatedly suggested an action plan for curbing crimes against women. On Sunday, we asked for this anger to be channelized constructively into specific demands. We repeat them here again:

* Create fast-track courts to deal with crimes against women;

* Ensure that the police collect evidence properly, and are sensitized to deal with victims of such crimes. Their performance should measured based on conviction rates;

* Create a safe environment for women by having zero tolerance of any kind of violence against them. In this the police as well as society as a whole have a role to play;

* Bring strong deterrence by changing the law to make chemical castration and life-term the punishment for rapes. For violent rapes, such as the one that has triggered these protests, the death penalty should be considered as a "rarest of rare" punishment.