Siwan (Bihar): When student protests broke out in Bihar last month, Aman Kumar Lal came into form.Bihar records the highest number of student protests after Kerala, national data show. Nineteen-year-old Lal has been a part of quite a few of those protests in recent years.He knew the drill. Gather around Patna’s Gandhi Maidan. Some angry slogans, some tongue-in-cheek digs. Wait for the police to arrive. Dodge their lathis. Enjoy their water cannons. Climb their barricades. Feel powerful. Return home pleased.Except, Patna now had a new dispensation. For the first time ever, the Bihar government was being run by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with chief minister Samrat Choudhary at the helm.Lal didn’t think twice. He left home on the morning of July 22, when students called for a protest. Except, this time, he couldn’t follow the script. A few hours into the protest, he was detained and then arrested by the police.“We thought they would let us go. But they refused to,” said Lal, adding that he felt “surprised” at this change of tactic.In custody, Lal was interrogated repeatedly, and was asked questions about who was “funding” him. Lal laughed. “I said, all the ration the government gives people like us has fuelled me.”The cops didn’t see the humour in it. Lal spent seven days in custody, and was released only on July 29.Lal’s experience, in a state known to tolerate student protests, even if grudgingly, is a part of a larger pattern: the changed approach of the Bihar government in quelling such demonstrations.The most glaring sign of this was the clutch of visuals that emerged from Siwan, where police officials fired AK-47 rifles and pistols at crowds gathered in the heart of the city on July 25, when student outfits had called for a Bihar Bandh. At least three people were injured when officials fired multiple rounds of bullets into the crowd. The Wire had, on August 25, reported how the three are struggling to recover, even one month after the incident.In quelling the protests, the Bihar Police had filed 64 First Information Reports (FIRs) against protesters and thousands of ‘unknown’ persons. It had also arrested or detained 694 people, of which at least 339 were minors.More proof of this came into public sight when, on August 26, hundreds of Bihari students and job aspirants gathered to demand the cancellation of the 70th Bihar Public Service Commission preliminary exam. As part of its effort to shut them down, the Bihar Police forcefully took a six-year-old protester out of the protest site by carrying him in their arms.Such excesses are increasingly the norm. Our reporting from across Bihar shows that the state police adopted violence, intimidation and arbitrary detentions as methods to quell the protests. In the process, they ended up violating constitutional safeguards and procedural norms.The Wire reached out to the head of Bihar police, Director General of Police Vinay Kumar over emails for his response to these findings. However, Kumar did not respond.Many blows and a bulletWhen visuals of the Siwan police firing multiple rounds from an AK-47 rifle and a pistol flooded the internet, Vishal Yadav was as stunned as the rest of the country.After all, Yadav, as one of the organisers of the protest, was at the site minutes before the firing took place. Yadav is the vice-president of the Inquilab Naujawan Sabha, the youth-wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation (CPI-ML). The CPI-ML continues to have pockets of influence across Bihar – it has two MLAs and MPs each from the state.But the protest, which started on the morning of July 25, was called off by around noon, said Yadav. “It went off peacefully and, like we had planned, we called it off by 12 PM and the crowds dispersed,” he said.Around midnight, a group of police officials knocked at his door in Thepaha village in Siwan’s Ziradei block – the birthplace of the country’s first president, Dr Rajendra Prasad.“By the time I could open it, they had broken the door down,” he said.The officials took Yadav to the police station and from there to Siwan city. He was taken inside a room at the police station there. Soon after, the police officials filtered out. Instead, seven-eight men in plain clothes came in.“One after the other, they came and slapped me on my face, kicked me and even hit me on my feet with lathis,” he said. “They threatened me, saying I should quit politics.”This continued for an hour. Yadav’s ears started paining. He was taken to the Siwan Sadar Hospital for a check up, but he said the doctors refused to check him or administer any treatment for his injuries.For three days, he was kept in custody. “We [referring to himself and others in sharing his lock up] did not get any food or even water in three days,” he said. “We kept begging the police, requesting them to give water at least.”One police official, when he was alone with them, secretly gave them a few sips of water. On the third day, they got food in the police van when they were being moved to judicial custody, Yadav said.On his release on July 30, he consulted doctors for the ear pain that refused to go.The repeated assault had burst his ear drums, the doctors said. He would have to undergo two surgeries, costing around Rs 35,000 each.The police hasn’t reached out to him, nor has it promised him any financial assistance in the treatment.In Dumrahar Bujurg, 20-year-old Bullet Kumar Gond knows that the assistance doesn’t matter much anyway.His treatment costs were borne by the Bihar government and he was also given Rs 50,000 as ex-gratia compensation. But neither of these have been able to take his mind away from the brutality of the moment which transformed his life.Immediately after he was hit by a bullet, Bullet remembers being surrounded by Bihar police officials. He thought they would escort him to a hospital. Instead, they assaulted him some more. Bullet was stunned.“I kept pointing to my bleeding leg, and told them I had been shot,” he said. “They hit me with lathis on the same leg and kept saying, “Madarchod, behenchod, protest mein aayega (Motherfucker, sisterfucker, you dared to come to the protest).”Another police man came a few minutes after the assault ended, and asked two others to drag Bullet to the police station. Bullet pleaded, cried in pain. “I told them I can’t even stand, let alone walk. They dragged me to the police station, and kept abusing me through it,” he said.For 45 minutes, Bullet kept writhing in pain. “I cried out in pain and kept asking for water, but no one in the police station came forward to help.”Apart from transferring the Siwan SP, the Bihar government suspended one constable, Abhishek Kumar Patel, for firing the AK-47 in the air.What about those policemen that abused him, that dragged him to the police station when he couldn’t even stand? Or those who refused to give him water and, instead, abused him even inside the police station.“I kept asking the police these questions, the day they came to meet me and record my statement,” Bullet said. But even his statement, he realised later, was not taken into account completely. Despite him pressing the point, the police officials refused to include a crucial detail in the FIR they filed – that some of the Siwan officials had attacked him repeatedly with lathis after he was hit by a bullet.Instead, the FIR quotes him saying that the police helped him reach the hospital, a falsity.Yet, none of this really matters to Bullet any more.He has been bedridden since July 25. As The Wire reported on August 25, Bullet was named by his grandparents, with a dream that he would join the army, the paramilitary forces or the police. His home, in Siwan’s Dumrahar Bujurg village, is home to his obsession with realising this dream – on his walls are photos that have disappeared even from government office walls, from Mahatma Gandhi to Pandit Nehru, from Bhagat Singh to Rajendra Prasad. Below them are the books that helped him prepare for these jobs, from general knowledge digests to maths books to self-help titles meant to aid his group discussion skills.The books taught him what it would mean to be an upright man in uniform. They told him he would be a protector.But being shot, abused and assaulted by men in uniform has left him disillusioned.“Ilaaj hi kara rahe hai woh badi baat hai. Ab aur inse kya mangiyega? (That they are even getting us treated is a big deal. What more can I expect from them?)” he asks.Procedures flouted, safeguards ignoredBeyond the lathis and bullets, Sachina saw up close what it meant to be in the crosshairs of the Bihar police in the days after the July protests.Sachina is a Patna-based human rights lawyer who provides legal aid to marginalised communities.When he first heard, after the July 22 protests, that students were being detained, he did what he always did in such cases – went to the police stations they were detained in, got copies of the FIR and started the paperwork to secure their release.This time, he hit a wall: he couldn’t find the people who had been arrested.“The police would deliberately take them from one police station to another and refuse to tell us where they were lodged,” Sachina said. “As a result, not even their parents knew where they were detained. That made it impossible for us to secure their release.”Sachina also pointed to another procedural violation – of producing those arrested before a magistrate within 24 hours of the arrest, under Section 58 of the BNSS Act.“For the first time in my legal career, I saw the police weren’t doing that. They produced most people 36 hours after they were arrested. In some cases, this was done at midnight,” Sachina added. “This is the most basic of constitutional protections and it was flouted.”Sachina also said the Bihar police wrongly arrested youngsters who had nothing to do with the protests“In one case, a police man arrested a student who was waiting at a bus stand. On the same day, a young woman who was coming back from attending a court hearing was arrested,” he said.The Bihar chapter of the People’s Union For Civil Liberties (PUCL) held a public hearing in Patna on August 22 on the issue of police excesses in quelling the protests. The hearing saw 20 testimonies from victims of police violence, including Bullet and Yadav, being presented in an open forum.The hearing reported at least 20 types of brutalities and misbehaviour by the Bihar police, which included hitting girls on their private parts, custodial torture suffered by the likes of Yadav, and making misogynist remarks targeting female protesters in custody.A lawyer involved in offering legal aid to some of the arrested protesters said police action was meant to scare the young off. “This unprecedented crackdown on young students is only meant to warn them against such protests in the future,” the lawyer said.Except, exactly a month later, students in Patna hit the streets again, demanding that the recruitment process be rectified.Amidst the crowds that milled towards the Raj Bhavan was Lal, doing what he has always done – protesting so that students like him have more opportunities. Thirty days after his arrest, he was at a protest again.Like the last time, the police brought out their water cannons and wielded their lathis.But Lal stood his ground. He made it known to the cops that come bullets or blows, students like him won’t cower.Kunal Purohit is an independent journalist.