New Delhi: Around 30 students and workers, including members of Himkhand, an environmental collective, were detained and beaten on Thursday (September 17) for protesting outside the Municipal Corporation of Delhi (MCD) office and demanding the MCD commissioner’s resignation, in light of the Satya Niketan PG calamity, which has left at least seven people dead, with students alleging that the death count has been misreported. Among those detained and beaten was a transwoman, Kranti, whose clothes were ripped by a male police personnel. They were also pejoratively called a man. “We were segregated based on gender, and they didn’t know where to place me. So they tore my clothes,” they said. For the past 12 days, a number of student groups, student political parties, and workers organisations, have been protesting at the site where a a five-storey building, which mainly housed college students, collapsed on September 6 in South West Delhi’s Satya Niketan, near Delhi University’s South Campus.Protesters were picked up and taken to the Kamla Market police station, where they were detained for about three hours. Photo by arrangement.On Thursday, the protesters were at the MCD office for a mere 15 minutes, before they were hurled into buses and taken to the Kamla Market police station. At the station, they were manhandled, pushed, and shoved. There were reportedly about 20 police officers, the majority being men.Also read: Whitewash Them All: Buildings, Bodies and Dreams of the Young“We went to the commissioner’s office because compensation has not yet been given and the government estimates do not reflect how many people died. The rubble has still not been removed,” said Vageesha, a second year student of PGDAV college. “At around 4 pm, they [the police] walked in with a warning banner. But we continued our protest.” The phones of those who recorded the roughhousing were snatched, only to be returned once the cops had stopped. Protestors categorised this as part of a “basic strategy” – where policemen exercise force, attempt to remove all traces of it, and are bordering on friendly once the violence has passed. “We were recording everything, and they didn’t want that. Soon after, they returned our phones. In fact, when we were sitting, they even encouraged us to record videos,” said Baksheesh, an independent journalist who was beaten. “Everything happened [the violence] in the initial five-ten minutes.”But after their phones were snatched, Baksheesh and another protester were taken to a different floor of the police station, where they were further manhandled. About three hours after their arrival, the protestors were let go, after the police noted down their names. Despite the documentation, Kamla Market SHO Sanjay Kumar Singh denied violence any wrongdoing. “They were protesting without permission and were blocking traffic. Section 163 BNS was imposed. We requested them to move,” he said. “They could have obtained an NOC.”Students now expect police crackdowns and are undeterred. In the run-up to the BRICS summit, Satya Niketan was swarming with cops – but not to supervise the clearing up of the detritus that remains nearly two weeks after the collapse of the building, or allay news of misreported death counts. Instead, one of them took the mic, announced that an international summit was taking place, and that the protest had been injected with anti-social elements — “Dimagi Naxals (Intellectual Naxals)” – hellbent on tarnishing the image of India. “I feel hopeless and unseen. We know the nature of the state but this is ridiculous,” said Vageesha.