The Supreme Court and the Delhi high court have been seized of many petitions arising out of the brutal lathi charge on protesting students on July 20 at the Jantar Mantar in Delhi. One set of petitions asks whether the Delhi Police broke the law when it turned lathis and tear gas on the protesters, and seeks action against those responsible. A second, brought on behalf of policemen allegedly hurt in that same protest, asks why the state never gave its own force the gear it owed them. The two sets of petitions relate to two different lineages of legal obligations of the state, one arising under Part III of the Constitution, and another arising out of an employer’s obligation to give adequate equipment to its employees, to enable them to perform their duties effectively and in comparable safety, within the limits of the inherent risk of the hazardous employment they have bravely chosen for themselves. The first issue is settled law and merely needs its application to the facts of the case. An FIR or more ought to have been registered by now against the policemen who acted beyond the constitutional limits; so far as the record shows, this has not been done, despite prima facie material showing criminal offences by uniformed personnel against citizens – and this does not require adjudication. The only issue, perhaps, is whether it is necessary to establish an autonomous investigation team that would be objective and impartial.The second is a legal obligation of an employer, and it is surprising that the police personnel or their superiors have not sought this from the government earlier. One wonders if it needed a writ petition by citizens who were brutalised to wake them up to the necessity of such gear; and this raises the suspicion that it may be a counterblast to the students’ petition. In any case, the issue is important, and if the safety of police officers is not ensured, they can hardly be expected to protect citizens or maintain law and order; and no student would grudge them their right to such protection. The question remains whether such petitions are intended to cancel out each other’s grievances.The timelineThe facts are not seriously disputed, only their legal consequence. On July 20, students and other citizens marched from Mandi House towards parliament, under the banner of the Cockroach Janta Party, demanding the resignation of the then Union education minister. What they got that afternoon was a police response – barricades, tear gas, lathi charge, and, by one petitioner’s count, at least 60 injured protesters. The police, for their part, say over 100 of their own men were hurt, and have denied — “completely false and misleading” in their words — that pellet guns were used.The protest was held at a place the Delhi Police had itself designated for protest. Yet, mobile internet in the area had been suspended; the nearest metro stations were shut; and roads were barricaded across large stretches of the capital, snarling traffic well beyond Jantar Mantar. Protesters took out a march to parliament; the rest was seen by the whole country. More specific and more troubling accounts have emerged, and these need investigation. It was seen that personnel deployed that afternoon, including reinforcements from the Rapid Action Force (RAF), wore no name plates and no insignia; that some among them are alleged to have carried lathis with nails, or wired to deliver an electric shock; that stones were brought to the place in a truck — no confirmation of who brought them; that private individuals, not in uniform, joined personnel in beating protesters; that women among the protesters were photographed by police in humiliating circumstances, and that those photographs were then further circulated; that lawyers who went to police stations that night to inquire after detained clients were themselves manhandled, and that no record of custody was kept for those held. Each of these, if true, is a separate and serious offence, and needs impartial investigation.The day after, the Delhi high court all but waved the matter away, telling one petitioner not to drag the courts into a street quarrel. The Chief Justice of India (CJI) was no warmer the following day, declining even to read a letter that had not yet become a petition – though the court has, at other times, had a glorious record of treating letters as writ petitions. By Friday, the tenor had changed, and on Monday a bench led by the CJI took the matter up in earnest. The CJI was unambiguous: the right to peaceful, lawful protest is absolutely guaranteed, and mere agitation does not license a lathi-charge. But the bench, in the same breath, allowed counsel for the families of injured policemen to join the proceedings, observing that injury to any individual is of equal concern to the court, and asked why adequate equipment had not been provided. Both threads were raised in one hearing, and will likely be argued together.The doctrine is not in doubtThe power to disperse an assembly — now Sections 148 to 150 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita, formerly Sections 129 to 131 of the CrPC — is a graduated power: a command to disperse, then civil force, and armed force only as a last resort under magisterial control (minimum and proportional force needed to disperse is the yardstick, not maximalist force to maim in a spirit of revenge). The doctrine governing how much of that force may lawfully be used was settled, dramatically, in 2012, a year after the Supreme Court took suo motu notice of a midnight police crackdown on Baba Ramdev’s sleeping followers at Ramlila Maidan. It called that action an abuse of power, ordered disciplinary and criminal proceedings against the officers responsible, and awarded compensation including, posthumously, to the family of Rajbala, who died of her injuries. The CJI’s observation on Monday, that agitation alone cannot justify a lathi-charge, is not a new rule. It is the old, established one, aptly restated.What the pending petitions add is the allegation, serious if made out, that plainclothes and unidentified personnel were used to disperse the crowd. This runs headlong into the identification requirement this court laid down in D.K. Basu v. State of West Bengal long ago in 1996. An unidentifiable officer wielding a lathi is, as a matter of ordinary principle, an unaccountable one. The court said as much in Prakash Singh v. Union of India in 2006, when it directed states to set up independent Police Complaints Authorities precisely so that allegations of this kind need not depend, each time, on a citizen finding her way to a constitutional court. Whether Delhi and the other states named in these petitions have actually done so is a question worth the court’s asking. And one wonders what such an authority, where one exists, or other statutory oversight bodies, have been doing about violations of exactly this kind.Why we don’t need fresh guidelinesThe petitions go further still, and rightly so. They challenge the routine, almost reflexive use of prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita — the old Section 144 used to ban gatherings, in new clothing — to convert a constitutional right into something that first needs the local police station’s permission, describing the practice as one of “rolling” prohibitory orders, renewed over long periods without any fresh or proximate threat to public order. This court has already held – in the Jantar Mantar guidelines it issued in 2018 – that regulation is one thing and prohibition dressed up as regulation is quite another.One petition also takes aim at Section 152 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita — the provision that has inherited the old sedition clause’s capacity for mischief — as dangerously capable of being turned against ordinary political dissent. None of this calls for a new law or even a new judgment. It calls for an independent inquiry, a Special Investigation Team, monitored by a retired Judge, on a model this court has used before, willing to look at the video and the medical evidence and say, plainly, what happened.There will be a temptation on the part of lawyers, once the court engages with these petitions, to treat the moment as an occasion for fresh, modern guidelines on protest policing. The temptation should be resisted. India is not short of law on the use of force; it is short of enforcement of the law it already has. D.K. Basu governs identification and custody. Prakash Singh governs structural oversight.PUCL v. State of Maharashtra, decided in 2014, lays down a 16-point protocol for investigating police use of lethal force, born of the same suspicion that animates this piece, that force used by the state against a citizen cannot safely be left to the state to investigate on its own. Add the graduated-force doctrine already written into the state police manuals, and the shelf is full. What is missing is not a fresh judgment to add to it. It is the will to take one down and use it.Public wrong, not private tortIf this inquiry finds excess, two things should follow, and it is worth being precise about both. The first is individual accountability — disciplinary action under service rules, and criminal prosecution under ordinary law, against the officers identified — exactly as this court ordered in Ramlila Maidan. And, in the meanwhile, suspension and, where warranted, arrest of the police personnel against whom credible allegations are made, to secure a fair inquiry and to prevent the tampering of evidence.The second is compensation to those injured, and here a point too often missed deserves emphasis. Compensation for a proven breach of Article 21, and of the associated freedoms in Article 19(1)(a), (b) and (c) — speech, assembly and association — is not something a victim must go and litigate afresh, in a civil suit, against an individual constable. This court held as much in 1993, in Nilabati Behera v State of Orissa, when it described compensation for a proven infringement of a fundamental right as a remedy in public law, grounded in the state’s own strict liability for the breach, and untouched by defences such as sovereign immunity that would apply to an ordinary tort claim. The wrong, in other words, is the state’s, not merely its constable’s, and the remedy can and should be moulded in these very proceedings. That single point of doctrine answers, by itself, the fear that a finding against some officers would leave the police force worse off. It would not. It would simply do what public law has always done: hold the state to account in the same forum that found it wanting. And, in the meanwhile, interim compensation, and medical treatment at state expense, for the protesters injured.How a writ petition diesThere is a well-worn path by which petitions of exactly this kind expire, and it is worth naming. An urgent plea over a specific afternoon’s excess is, almost imperceptibly, reframed as a request for nationwide standard operating procedures on crowd control. A committee is constituted — a retired judge or two, a senior bureaucrat, a police officer for balance — and the immediate prayer – prosecution and compensation for what happened on July 20, is quietly deferred pending its report. The committee asks for time and gets it. Status reports arrive in sealed covers. Interim orders busy themselves with administrative tweaks rather than liability. By the time the report is filed, the news cycle has moved on and so, mostly, has everyone else, and the matter is disposed of with an instruction to implement the committee’s recommendations as far as practicable, which is a formula for implementing very little of them at all. The officers who used excessive force face no consequence whatsoever. The systemic recommendations join a long shelf of reports nobody reads. This is not a hypothetical; it is closer to the median outcome of police-accountability litigation in this country. And the surest way to arrive here is to let the rights track be swallowed by the welfare track’s entirely legitimate, and entirely different, appetite for committees and status reports. The committee model is right for one of these tracks. It is a graveyard for the other.The helmet is a different caseNone of this, however, has anything to do with whether Delhi Police issued its personnel adequate protective gear, and it is worth saying plainly that the bench asked the right question. A constable sent into a hostile crowd without a helmet has as real a claim to protection as anyone marching against him. But it is a different species of claim. Questions that arise are: What do the Bureau of Police Research and Development’s own norms prescribe? What was actually issued to personnel deployed on 20 July? What is the gap, and on what timeline will it be closed? Those are questions for a status report, not a trial — the same status-report model this court reached for in 2009 — by appointing the Thomas and Nariman Committees. The welfare of the police is not a lesser question for being an administrative one. It is simply a different one, and it deserves an answer on its own timeline, not one held hostage to an inquiry it has nothing to do with.These are two legally distinct questions, belonging to two different jurisprudential streams — one to the constitutional law of restraint upon the state, the other to the ordinary law of an employer’s obligations to those in its own service. This distinction matters beyond the four corners of this case. A constitutional court’s authority rests on the discipline of asking one question at a time and answering it on its own evidence. Every time two unrelated grievances are allowed to travel together because they arrived at the registry in the same week, that discipline erodes a little further, and the next litigant learns that the way to blunt a rights claim is to find a sympathetic counter-grievance to file alongside it. That would be an insidious design to perpetuate injustice under camouflage.P.V.S. Giridhar is a senior advocate. He is also an International Trade & Energy Law Consultant and Guest Faculty at the SVP National Police Academy.