Some years back, on a December afternoon, crowds of young people had spilled onto the streets of Delhi to protest the gang rape and murder of a girl — an incident that led to enough outrage for the rape laws to be changed.

I was at Jantar Mantar one afternoon in the midst of the protests when loud jeers were heard from the crowd. The crowd was heckling Sheila Dikshit, then chief minister of Delhi, who had come to the spot to light a candle in memory of the girl. Dikshit lit the candle and left immediately, the crowd continuing to heckle her as her vehicle drove away.

It seemed these were times like no other in the capital. From the Lokpal protests to the protest against the gang rape, freedom of expression oozed onto the streets of Delhi, with policemen quietly watching as people swarmed the roads, except for a couple of instances of police action.

The contrast with the present cannot be sharper. Students at the Jamia Millia Islamia university have borne the brunt of police action for protesting the Citizenship (Amendment) Act. Vandalism outside the campus invited severe police action inside it.

Not even the library was a safe place any longer. Students at Aligarh Muslim University also faced the severest police action. And students at JNU — protesting fee hikes — have been lathi-charged multiple times. But the police did not act to protect them when armed, masked men brutalised students in hostels and left behind heart-rending images of a bleeding student and a bleeding professor.

Contrast this with the times when many of us, including me, thought we were under the “worst government” ever.

The term of Manmohan Singh was the one that saw public protests become an everyday occurrence. People marched to influence the process of lawmaking. And they marched to seek justice for a rape victim who died of brutal injuries.

A couple of condemnable instances of police action apart — like the use of water cannons on the gang-rape protesters and the tear-gassing of the crowd at the protest of yoga guru Ramdev, leading to the death of one elderly woman — the period marked the high point of Indian democracy. People seemed to have taken charge of the republic, marching mostly peacefully at India Gate, Jantar Mantar and on the streets abutting Ramlila Maidan.

These sights would be pregnant with the possibility of the world’s largest democracy finally coming into its own. The purported authors of the Preamble — “We, the people of India” — seemed to have decided to be heard, and counted. They were proud citizens, not deluded subjects, and they wished to have a tough Lokpal law enacted and rape laws tightened.

The Manmohan Singh government set an example for what a democracy should look like. The anti-corruption mood — propelled by reports on the Commonwealth Games, Adarsh Housing Society, 2G spectrum and coal block scams — led to Anna Hazare’s Lokpal agitation.

An ageing man from a Maharashtra village would be covered live by all television channels openly criticising the government of the day. Arvind Kejriwal would openly call the ministers thieves. Yet the police would be a peaceful bystander.

For more than 10 days at a stretch, I stayed at Ramlila Maidan till late at night. People would lustily raise slogans against Sonia Gandhi, Manmohan Singh and Rahul Gandhi. Traders would feed the crowds.

The Tricolour would flutter all around. Sometimes, young men without helmets would ride bikes on the roads near the ground with Tricolours, with no challans despite traffic rules being broken. And Hazare would remind the gathering of the sacrifices of Bhagat Singh, Rajguru and Sukhdev.

The government responded by agreeing to a discussion on the Lokpal in Parliament, with Pranab Mukherjee setting the tone by lavishly praising Hazare. People saw all this as mere pretence, and the anti-Congress mood — generated by presumptive loss figures from a CAG report few could understand — continued.

Unfortunately, the best of times are made sense of only in retrospect. For, they come disguised as a hope; as a future possibility. And their futuristic promise makes the present seem bleak.

In those days, protest seemed to most a right. Parents would not prevent their college-going children from staying at the protest site. Families would come with their toddlers, telling their children about Mahatma Gandhi. Everyone at the Anna protests felt safe. The protest site was a home away from home. It was the heart of a throbbing democracy, as it were.