New Delhi: On the morning of October 13, Cockroach Janta Party leaders Saurav Das, Ashutosh Ranka, Ajinkya Shinde and a handful of volunteers broke through a citadel, which all of Central Delhi had been barricaded and fortified to protect over the past weekend: Jantar Mantar. What until not a long ago, was the epicentre of dissent and public anger, had been eerily silent. Just a day earlier, on October 12, it was ‘denotified’ as a protest site. The trio has since been arrested on charges of trespassing, bond violation, obstruction of a public official’s duty, and sent to judicial custody for five days.Jantar Mantar, not a particularly large space, had been designated to hold every defiance and grouse — from worker’s agitations and refugee crises, to the historic Citizenship Amendment Act protests, and just a few months ago, the youth movement which triggered the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. In a notice, Delhi Commissioner of Police Anurag Kumar announced that based on the recommendations of a committee set up by the Union home ministry, alternative venues have been proposed: Ramlila Ground, Burari Ground, and CBD Ground in East Delhi. None of these are as central as Jantar Mantar, and are likely to push protesters towards the periphery of the city, both literally and in public imagination. There are other hurdles too. Booking Ramlila Maidan can cost up to Rs 2 lakhs, a report says, and even then, the site is booked for the next two and a half months.One might argue that in the day and age of digital protests, where every statement and slogan is immortalised on social media, physical spaces lose relevance. However, this might be a bit of an oversimplification. The ongoing agitation against the special intensive revision (SIR) of voter rolls has been shaped, in certain ways, by the absence of Jantar Mantar. Its most totemic images have been student leaders being wrenched out of the site, hundreds of police officers and paramilitary forces lining what used to be a relatively free space, and the marches of senior political leaders to Jantar Mantar being thwarted in ghastly ways. It lingers on. In this screengrab from a video posted on Oct. 13, 2026, Police detain CJP leader Saurav Das and other workers at Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi. Photo: @abhijeet_dipke/X.Constitutional jurist and former Vice-Chancellor of National Law School of India University (NLSIU), Bengaluru, G. Mohan Gopal, explained that the wrongly disparaged word “protest” itself means in essence “providing testimony in public, bearing witness,” where citizens bear witness to their anguish directly to those in power.“Bearing of witness by the people was pushed back from parliament across the street and restricted to the Boat Club area. When that became intolerable they pushed it further away to a much less visible area in Jantar Mantar, an act of further distancing of people from power, he said.“People bearing direct witness of their anguish to power through protest becomes meaningless when proximity is lost. Democratic governments should insist that protest takes place in proximity to power. Today the idea is not just to restrict protest. It is to extinguish protest entirely.”“The terms public order and law and order do not have the same meaning in a democracy as they do in an autocracy. In a democracy, public order is ‘democratic order’: and ‘law and order’ is ‘protection of human rights’,” said the professor.“The whole thing is being turned on its head. The state itself is attacking democracy and human rights, under the pretence of maintaining public order and law and order. This can only happen in an autocracy and so that it is happening is evidence that we are indeed now in an autocracy as is being said by independent international observers.”Whither notification?A video of the CBD Ground in Shahadra, one of the newly designated protests sites, shared by journalist Abhinav Yadav of Khabar Gaon, shows an avalanche of garbage under which the ground is assumed to be buried. The reporter also says that there is a rancid smell because of the number of dead animals.CBD ग्राउंड की हकीकत देखिए कूड़े के ढेर पर कौन आएगा प्रदर्शन करने?चारों तरफ़ कूड़े का ढेर, बदबू और बड़ी-बड़ी घास।@Cockroachisback @AshutoshRanka @INCIndia @RahulGandhi @official_dda @AamAadmiParty https://t.co/xByb5EYS2W— Abhinav Yadav (@abhinav_2601) October 13, 2026While the rationale behind the selection of sites deserves introspection, so does the process itself. While Jantar Mantar was established as a protest site in 1993, it does not appear to have ever been formally notified, which begets the question of how exactly it has been denotified. Former Supreme Court Judge Gopal Gowda addressed this glaring lack of transparency, while also questioning why the police commissioner was entrusted with the order. “First of all, the home ministry has constituted a committee. If the committee has made these recommendations, what are their reasons? It is unconstitutional, undemocratic, and unreasonable. In my view, it amounts to a blatant violation of Article 19(b) [the right to peacefully assemble and hold public meetings or processions],” he said. “Why has this power been designated to the police commissioner, who is supposed to maintain law and order?” he added.Justice Gowda also assured the fact that there is “strong resentment on the basis of which the protest is organised.” The monumentBack in the precedented days, a cursory visit would entail a mishmash of sloganeering and placards. There would be groups of students in one corner, perhaps workers in another. Watching over them all was a monument. “It is such a landmark monument that it gave the site its name,” said historian Swapna Liddle, who narrated a quick history of Jantar Mantar, which was originally a reflection of Mughal Emperor Akbar’s relationship with the state of Amer. Akbar married the princess of Amer, who became Jehangir’s mother, said Liddle.Her great nephew, Mansingh, grew into an important general in Akbar’s empire, and the land on which Jantar Mantar sits became permanent property of the Jaipur state in Mughal Delhi, explained Liddle. In the second half of the 18th century, Jai Singh II built the astronomical observatory, which typically made use of naked-eye readings and was said to be remarkably accurate. While its history as a protest side dates back to the early 1990s, when it replaced the Boat Club its actual history goes back centuries — a physical demarcation of the relationship between the Mughals and the erstwhile state of Jaipur. ‘To wipe out protest’In 2017, the National Green Tribunal, in a response to a series of complaints by residents of Jantar Mantar Road, briefly revoked the use of Jantar Mantar as a protest site. Sit-ins, loudspeakers, sloganeering, and processions were banned. But less than a year later, it was reinstituted, with the Supreme Court asserting that the right to peacefully protest is a fundamental right. The top court also highlighted that Ramlila Maidan, which has been proposed this time around as well, was located in a “congested area” and therefore might not be the most suitable area for a site of public protest. In the years since, it has witnessed extraordinary acts of courage, protests that have awoken entire cities and communities to injustice. In 2023, mere months before the World Championships, India’s greatest wrestlers spent days at Jantar Mantar, bodily representations of serious sexual violence allegations against then WFI chief Brij Bhushan Singh. Sakshi Malik and Vinesh Phogat among Indian wrestlers, protesting against BJP lawmaker and Wrestling Federation of India president Brijbhushan Sharan Singh. Photo: Twitter/@Phogat_VineshThousands gathered peacefully in 2020-2021 against the Citizenship Amendment Act and the National Register of Citizens. Jailed student activist Umar Khalid led a march from Mandi House to Jantar Mantar, where he was joined by hundreds of people. There was a desire for freedom, poetry of revolution and remembrance – and much of it congregated at Jantar Mantar. This was despite the protest’s centre of gravity shifting to Shaheen Bagh. Several papers and articles from across the globe have explained how critical it is that these demands and these acts of visibility take place publicly. “Urban spaces are often ideal sites for protest. In addition to being visible to the general public, these squares are often surrounded by important government buildings, lending a symbolic quality to revolts,” reads a more clinical definition. “However, just as they attract protestors voicing their frustrations, public spaces have also been historically used by repressors to silence dissent. In this way, urban spaces are not simply neutral containers for social movements, but an important tool to either kindle or extinguish burgeoning revolutions.”Essentially, a protest site is not just a conduit, but a political space which lends itself to movements. Equivalent spaces exist across the globe, like Egypt’s Tahrir Square, where the 2011 Egyptian Revolution unfolded. When vegetable vendor Muhammad Bouazizi set himself on fire in the heart of the city, it ignited a revolution transporting people from the privacy of their homes to the street. Similarly, Jantar Mantar also foregrounds the people – a spectacle of wants, rights and pleas – making its denotification a cause for concern, and an act that goes against the tenor of democracy. “Dissent has a different meaning in a democracy and in an autocracy. In a democracy, law and order is the upholding of human rights,” said professor Gopal. “The whole thing is being turned on its head. Today the idea is not just to restrict protest. It is to extinguish protest entirely.”