When Indians protested in London this October, a version of the following travelled fast: “No Indian was arrested in London for waving the Indian flag on British soil. But Indian youths are behind bars for waving a flag on Indian soil.” The comparison is emotionally compelling. But it is also a troubling one.Hundreds gathered in London to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar and to protest the violent treatment of demonstrators in Delhi. Behind the protests is a voter-roll revision that has removed more than 130 million names. The response in Delhi, though, is a matter of record. Thousands of police and paramilitary personnel were deployed in central Delhi, metro stations and internet were shut, and a Union home ministry official said more than 2000 people were detained. Indians abroad were defending a basic democratic principle: those who hold power must answer for how they use it. Outside India House and later at Parliament Square, protesters carried Indian flags, criticised the Indian state and dispersed peacefully. The contrast with Delhi is stark. But the explanation is not simply that Britain tolerates dissent and India does not.A protest in London against the Indian government does not directly challenge the British government. No British minister’s political future depends on India’s electoral rolls, and no British institution is being called to account. In Delhi, protesters are questioning the authorities whose decisions they question and who also control the machinery used to police their protest. That distinction matters because it also carries a historical irony. The British Raj used the law to restrict dissent. The Rowlatt Act of 1919 allowed detention without trial, while Section 144 gave magistrates the power to prohibit public gatherings. That same year, on 13 April, British troops under Reginald Dyer opened fire on a crowd gathered at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar. Hundreds were killed. The massacre exposed the violence behind the colonial government’s claims to maintain order: when Indians challenged its authority, even a public gathering could be treated as a threat.Indians spent decades fighting such repression. In 1923, during the Flag Satyagraha led by Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, volunteers in Nagpur insisted on their right to march with the flag. They were arrested. The struggle was about more than a flag. It was about the right of Indians to gather, protest and express their political freedom in public.Independence was supposed to mark a break with that legacy. The constitution guarantees citizens the right to assemble peacefully and without arms. Yet the powers used to restrict public assembly survived. During the anti-CAA protests in 2019, Delhi invoked Section 144 (now Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita) to prohibit gatherings. Today, restrictions on public assembly and the removal of Jantar Mantar’s status as a designated protest site have again raised questions about the space available for dissent. The circumstances are not identical to those under colonial rule, but the troubling continuity lies in the use of public-order powers to restrict dissent.The institutional question at the heart of these protests raises the stakes. The Election Commission is meant to be the umpire of Indian democracy. In 2023, the Supreme Court directed that the CEC be chosen by a panel that included the chief justice of India. Parliament then replaced the chief justice with a Union minister, leaving the executive with a majority on the selection panel. Once appointed, the commissioner can be removed only through a process akin to that for a Supreme Court judge, which leaves public pressure as one of the few levers citizens hold. Whether or not one agrees that Gyanesh Kumar should go, demanding it is a legitimate way of asking an institution to justify itself.That is what makes the comparison with London so unsettling. It risks making the former coloniser’s restraint the benchmark for Indian freedom, as though the right to assemble were a favour London could grant or Delhi could withdraw. It is neither. Indians fought for that right and the constitution protects it. These are not gifts from any state; these are hard-won constitutional rights.A republic that meets dissent with violence betrays those rights. In Delhi, that betrayal has taken the form of barricades, thousands of armed personnel, detention centres and buses lined up to carry protesters away. A government confident in its legitimacy would not need to turn its capital into a fortress. Such a show of force suggests that a state unable to defend its actions is resorting to silencing those who expose them. Pankhuri Agarwal is a lecturer and Leverhulme fellow at the King’s College London. She is also the author of Fictions of Freedom: Migration, Modern Slavery and Bureaucracy in India, Cambridge University Press, 2026 (open access).