On October 15, the Supreme Court issued notice on a petition by advocate Swaty Singh challenging the Delhi Police’s decision to de-notify Jantar Mantar as a designated protest site. According to media reports, the Supreme Court orally observed that it would examine whether the authority had considered the site’s use and effectiveness. The Solicitor General (SG) told the court that its earlier order was not the basis for the decision – a committee had reported, and reasons had been recorded. Two days earlier, the Delhi Police told the Delhi high court that Jantar Mantar was de-notified under the Supreme Court’s October 9 order, which asked the competent authority to consider only sites capable of housing basic amenities for peaceful protest.The de-notification decision is signed by the commissioner of police on October 11, a day after mass detentions during the ongoing protest. It records that the Ministry of Home Affairs (MHA) constituted a committee and that, on the committee’s recommendation, Jantar Mantar is de-notified; and that Ramlila Ground, Burari Ground and CBD Ground in East Delhi are designated instead. A “detailed and revised” procedure for the new venues will follow “separately”. The order discloses neither the committee’s report nor any reasons. It cites no source of power for the decision.The usual question is whether Jantar Mantar is irreplaceable. That is the wrong question, and the state wins it because the Supreme Court’s 2018 decision in Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v Union of India (MKSS) itself holds that no one may claim a right to protest at one particular place. The better question is what the state owes when it channels dissent into designated sites. In this piece, I argue that the Supreme Court’s protest cases contain a bargain whose second half has never been spelt out. Protesters must go where they are sent; in return, the state must send them somewhere. I call this the duty to designate, and I argue that the 2026 order, whatever its merit on the facts, does not discharge it.How Jantar Mantar became a designated siteOn 5 October 2017, the National Green Tribunal (NGT), on an application by residents of Jantar Mantar Road, ordered an end to dharnas, protests, public speeches and loudspeakers on the road, and the shifting of protesters to Ramlila Maidan.In MKSS, the Supreme Court overturned that ban. It accepted the NGT’s account of the residents’ plight but held that the remedy was regulation, not prohibition. However, the Court also held that no one may claim a right to protest at one particular place, and it directed the Delhi police commissioner to frame the guidelines under which the site operated.MKSS held that where residents’ rights and protesters’ rights collide, balancing means curtailing a right, not extinguishing it: “total extinction is not balancing”. Its settlement assumed that Jantar Mantar would stay available in regulated form.Thereafter, the commissioner, following consultation with the MHA, the NDMC and residents’ associations, issued guidelines for organising protests in Central Delhi, including Jantar Mantar and Boat Club.Two cases, one bargainIn Amit Sahni v Commissioner of Police (2020), arising from the women-led sit-in against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA), 2019 at Shaheen Bagh, the Supreme Court dealt with a similar question: balancing the right to protest with commuters’ use of a public road. Justice Sanjay K. Kaul, for a three-judge bench, held that public ways cannot be occupied indefinitely and that dissent must take place at designated sites. The court was no less clear that the right to protest must be “respected and encouraged by the state”.Amit Sahni states the protesters’ side of the arrangement. It says nothing of the state’s. Yet a rule that dissent must go to designated places assumes that there are places to go to. MKSS supplied the missing half. Relying on Himat Lal K. Shah v Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad, it says the state may only make regulations “in aid of the right of assembly”, and it quotes the Ramlila Maidan holding that the state must aid, not throttle, the exercise of the right. A state that requires dissent to be channelled therefore owes the channel. Designation is not only a power the commissioner may use. It is the state’s side of an exchange, and a state that withdraws its side cannot insist on the other.Also Read: In Photos: Two-and-a-Half Decades of Covering Protests at Jantar MantarThe commissioner’s power to designate (and re-designate) venues therefore probably exists. The order cites no statute, and its clearest pedigree is the court’s own direction in MKSS to devise a mechanism. But it is a conditioned power: it must be exercised through a lawful, reasoned and proportionate process, and it must leave the right effectively exercisable. The consequence is practical. For a protest held where the state has yet to say how protest may be held, the offence is not defiance of a designation rule. Amit Sahni cannot be used to punish protesters for not going where the state has not yet told them to go.What adequate designation requiresWhy must designation be adequate at all? Because of what a protest is. The “space of appearance” arises when people act and speak together before others. Politics needs to be seen and heard by those it addresses. A protest is an address to the state, delivered where the state must see it. The Supreme Court has recognised part of this. MKSS describes protest as the way citizens expose flaws in governance and demand accountability, and Amit Sahni calls dissent indispensable to democracy, citing Walter Lippmann. Neither asks what is lost when the address is moved. Three conditions follow from the cases. The 2026 de-notification order does not show any of them.First, the site must be real – capable of receiving the protest it is meant to serve. MKSS did not think Ramlila Maidan met that test alone. The court conceded that it is far from the centres of power, and held that the ground sits in a “very congested” part of Old Delhi with limits of its own, so that “some other area is required”. Jantar Mantar was kept for that reason. The 2026 order sends protest back to Ramlila, adds Burari and an East Delhi ground, and says nothing on why these suffice. Whether they can take a large or short-notice protest, and at what cost to organisers (the MKSS petitioners complained of a daily hire charge at Ramlila), are questions the order does not touch.Second, the site must be usable on the day. MKSS contemplated prior permission, but only on parameters laid down in advance. Himat Lal struck down a permission rule because it said nothing on when permission could be refused. The 2026 order promises a “detailed and revised” procedure “separately”. Until it arrives, the commissioner holds an unguided discretion over every protest, the very defect in Himat Lal, now created by choice. Timing compounds the defect. In Lashmankin v Russia, the European Court of Human Rights found violations of Articles 11 and 13 partly because organisers, whose assemblies the authorities had asked them to move, could not obtain a judicial ruling before the planned date. A protest that cannot be held on the day cannot be held later.Third, the site must keep the protest within sight of those it addresses, or the state must explain why it cannot. MKSS accepted that a demonstration aims to reach “concerned persons for whom these are meant”, and it records counsel’s reliance on the OSCE-Venice Commission Guidelines on Freedom of Peaceful Assembly, without engaging them. International bodies, including the OSCE/ODIHR panel of experts, have said that assembly includes protest within “sight and sound” of its target. Lashmankin applied that idea: the purpose of an assembly is often tied to a location, and authorities who propose another must give relevant and sufficient reasons. Two caveats are fair. The European court allows states a wider margin on place than on outright bans, and MKSS itself answered the visibility argument with technology. Neither excuses an order that gives no reasons at all.Regulation by removalThe order gives no reasons, so the state’s case must be inferred. What risk was identified, on what material, and why could further regulation (caps, hours, structures) not meet it? The bench has said it will examine these questions. The likely answers are the old ones: congestion, noise, tents, occupied roads. MKSS heard all of them. The court accepted the Tribunal’s findings of fact and then located the fault elsewhere: the conditions arose “primarily because” the authorities did not regulate, and the remedy was to cap numbers, bar tents, fix hours and enforce noise norms. Amit Sahni faulted the administration’s inaction in the same way.A state that fails to enforce such rules, and then cites the resulting conditions to remove the site, turns its own non-enforcement into a justification. Call it the ratchet of non-enforcement. MKSS held in effect that a ban cannot cure a failure to regulate, and the 2026 order must be tested against that holding.Also Read: Jantar Mantar: What Experts Feel About the Denotification of DissentThe ratchet has a history. Protests at Boat Club were restricted after Mahendra Singh Tikait’s agitation. Jantar Mantar became the site in 1993. Protests after the Nirbhaya rape case took place at India Gate and Raisina Hill in 2012. The CAA protests reached Jantar Mantar and India Gate; the Shaheen Bagh sit-in began on 15 December 2019, and in 2021 the farmers camped at Delhi’s borders. In 2021, when a farmers’ body opposed to the farm laws asked to protest at Jantar Mantar, a Supreme Court bench said the farmers had already “strangulated the entire city”. In a separate petition on the road blockades, counsel for the farmers argued that they had arisen from being stopped short of Ramlila Maidan. The pattern is displacement. Protest is pushed outward, the occupation of the edges becomes the reason to push it further, and each step is justified by the disorder the previous step produced.The state’s best answersThe state’s strongest answer is sensitivity. Jantar Mantar lies near Parliament; MKSS held that the test is apprehension of a breach of peace, not clear and present danger, and it took intelligence inputs and foreign visits seriously. But MKSS used those considerations to justify regulation, not removal. For Boat Club, the most sensitive site of all, it directed guidelines on numbers, distance from Parliament, routes and bans on days of dignitary visits. Deference on the need for regulation does not extend to the choice of the most restrictive form.And Anuradha Bhasin applies proportionality to restrictions on Article 19 freedoms and requires restriction orders to be published; a committee report no one has seen cannot discharge that burden. Amit Sahni’s call to keep public ways clear of obstruction is no different: it concerned an indefinite blockade of a road, and it licenses clearing encroachments, not abolishing a site.The state will also invoke the holding that nobody can claim to protest at one particular place. That is right, and it is why the duty to designate does not depend on Jantar Mantar. There is no right to a particular place, but there is a right to an adequate one. De-notification is wrong not because Jantar Mantar is special, but because the order has not shown that anything adequate replaces it, and has not followed a process the cases permit.The state may add the technology answer. MKSS observed that a voice now travels through social media, and Justice Joymalya Bagchi has flagged the technological dimension on October 15. But a post reaches everyone and addresses no one, and the mobile internet, reportedly suspended around Central Delhi and the detention centres ahead of the 10 October protest, is a channel the state has repeatedly shut. An address the state may mute at will is no substitute for presence.The constitutional design points the same way. Ambedkar warned in the Constituent Assembly on 25 November 1949 that civil disobedience, non-cooperation and satyagraha are the “grammar of anarchy”. But he said they have no justification “where constitutional methods are open”. A peaceful assembly within sight of Parliament is the constitutional method. Moving it out of sight narrows the very channel his argument assumes.The court’s roleThe SG says the committee’s report exists and reasons were recorded. The Court should call for both, along with the provision that authorises the order, the procedure for the three new venues, and a route for protests that cannot wait. It should hold the commissioner to Amit Sahni: the administration must own its decisions and not “hide behind the court orders”, which is what the Delhi Police told the high court it had done. Until the material is produced, the arrangement framed under the 2018 direction should stand, because a settlement made at the court’s direction should not be unmade by a report no one has seen. And the Court should name the duty: a state that channels dissent into designated sites must provide a site that is real, usable and within sight, or give reasons why it cannot.Jantar Mantar was the place where the state could not easily look away. A protest site is an address to the state, and a venue chosen to keep it out of the state’s sight changes what the protest says. The state may regulate where the address is delivered, but a venue that puts it beyond the state’s sight is something other than regulation. Until the court decides whether this order is lawful, reasoned, and proportionate, Jantar Mantar should be restored.Sarthak Gupta is a New Delhi-based advocate and Researcher at Columbia University, New York, working on a project on free speech, media laws and censorship. He has previously served as a law clerk in the Supreme Court.