‘Hum sign nahin karenge, bond…we will not sign the bond’.It was said again, almost in passing, in the middle of a pause that interrupted a walk, in the wake of an improvised press conference held in the lawn of the parliamentary party office of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist-Liberation) in Meena Bagh, New Delhi, where it had just been said, minutes before, more formally.And then it was said again, this time with a slight incline of the head, and that familiar defiant smile. And then it went viral.By now, Neha Bora’s quiet, confident, almost casually expressed refusal to sign a ‘peace bond’ promising not to make a ‘breach of peace’ to a ‘special executive magistrate’ (SEM) who also does double-duty as an assistant commissioner of police, has made a kind of history.It joins other such refusals, including those made by M.K. Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, Madhu Limaye – his refusal to sign became the subject of a landmark Supreme Court judgment which we will come to later – and Bhagat Singh and his HSRA comrades’ total rejection of a judge’s demand for ‘good behaviour’ by stating ‘we are not schoolboys’. The dignity of Neha Bora’s refusal adds this act as another link in the long chain of refusals that marks the history of the face-off between liberty and arrogance in India.This particular refusal’s disdain for the manipulative mischief of the supple police instrument of a ‘peace bond’ – and for the juridical contortions of the Delhi High Court’s endorsement of this rusty device of Medieval English common law’s continued application on the streets of fortress Delhi in the year 2026 – has made its mark. It expresses a simple and categorical truth: that a violent regime does not get to be the monitor of a peaceful protestor’s ’good behaviour’, and it does not get to use that monitoring to blackmail the protestor into silence and submission.We.Will.Not.Sign.The Bond.An afternoon with the special executive magistrate – and WhatsApp unclesAfter declaring their stand in public, Neha went to the Mandir Marg Police Station to meet the SEM, Mahesh Kumar Meena, as was mandated in the Delhi high court order dismissing their petition to quash the ‘show cause notice’ demanding to know why a peace bond would not be signed.Advocate Abhik Chimni, representing Neha, handed ACP/SEM Meena, a copy of Justice Subramaniom Prasad’s judgment, paragraph 38 of which states that the SEM must give to the respondent (Neha) copies of the ‘material evidence’ that had caused the magistrate to surmise that Neha might ‘breach the peace’. ACP/SEM Meena then handed over the same. An exchange, at least of papers, took place.Outside the police station, a crowd of WhatsApp uncles under the tutelage of one advocate, Syed Ahmed Rizwan, had already been in attendance, raising slogans that expressed their desire to assault ‘traitors’ like Neha, with shoes. (They had amended the original ‘desh ke gaddaron ko, goli maro salon ko’ slogan slightly, substituting ‘joote’ (shoes) in place of ‘goli’ (bullets) so as to maintain a semblance of respectability in the face of cameras.) They also garlanded police personnel through the bars of the gates of Mandir Marg Police Station and offered a somewhat lacklustre rendition of ‘Delhi Police zindabad’ (‘Long live Delhi Police’).This motley group of middle-aged busybodies later issued a statement to the effect that they had actually come to file a complaint with the Delhi Police Cybercrime Cell against Neha Bora’s recent online address to the Socialist Students Front of Bangladesh, in which Bora had expressed salutations to the struggles of Bangladeshi young people for democracy and against religious fundamentalism.Having attempted to file their complaint, they just happened to be there when Neha arrived and so, provoked by their presence, the WhatsApp Uncles obviously could not but give vent to their feelings. ‘Neha Bora Kooda Hai’, (‘Neha Bora is garbage’), ‘Dimagi Naxal Hai-Hai’, (‘Down with Mental Naxals’) ‘Desh ke Gaddaron ko, Joote Maro Salon Ko’, (‘Beat the traitors with shoes’), and so on. Their excitement was so intense that Neha didn’t feel safe walking through this throng. No woman or non-binary individual can be faulted in today’s India for feeling a level of discomfort at the prospect of having to wade through a knot of clearly hostile masculine bodies.This meant that Neha had to be taken into the police station in their advocate’s car. The video of this car (a Toyota Camry with a Delhi registration) going into the police station prompted a tiny online whirlwind amongst right-wing chatterati – with snarky remarks about ‘how do left wing students in JNU afford such expensive cars…’ and the usual demands for investigations into ‘who funds Neha Bora’.The SEM sitting inside the police station at the time obviously did not think that the loud sloganeering and threat of violence made at his doorstep constituted a ‘breach of peace’. No WhatsApp Uncle (I saw just one aunty in this crowd when she was summoned to garland a policewoman) was asked to sign a bond, or asked to ‘show cause’ why they should not be signing a bond to abstain from causing any breach of peace.What the Show Cause Notice saidOn October 17, the same Mahesh Kumar Meena had issued a notice to Neha Bora after they were kept in custody overnight, for nearly 23 hours, first at the Palam-Manglapuri Anti-Narcotics Cell Police Station, and then at the Ramakrishna Puram Police Station. Neha had been detained on the preceding evening at the Mandi House roundabout in central Delhi.ACP/SEM Meena’s notice reads as follows:“NOTICE UNDER SECTION 126/130 BNSSWhereas it has been made to appear to me by a credible information received from SHO/B.K. Road, New Delhi through SI Vaishali Tushir that you, Neha Bora D/o Hoshiyar Singh R/o H. No. 25, Meena Bagh, Maulana Azad Road, Delhi, created nuisance by shouting loudly in protest at round-about Mandi House and you have already been involved in repeated protest related activity in and around Jantar Mantra, New Delhi, despite prohibitory orders 163 BNSS. You instigated people to participate in unauthorized demonstration at Central Park, Connaught Place which is not a designated protest site and also hoist the national flag without obtaining valid permission. There is every likelihood of apprehension of breach of public peace and tranquility within the jurisdiction of this court. That you are likely to commit a breach of peace or to do a wrongful act which may probably converted in a breach of peace or disturbance of public tranquility within the local limits and jurisdiction of this court. You may take law in your hands and likely to do a wrongful act which may cause breach of peace and public tranquility in the area. I am satisfied that there are sufficient grounds to initiate proceedings against you u/s 126/169 BNSS.I, MAHESH KUMAR MEENA, Special Executive Magistrate, New Delhi, Distt. New Delhi hereby requires you to attend in person (or with a duly authorized agent) in my court on 19.10.2026 at 2.00 P.M to show cause as to why you may not be required to execute a Personal Bond in the sum of Rs. 10,000/- each with one surety in the like amount of Rs. 10,000/- U/S 135 (3) BNSS for keeping peace for a period of enquiry.”This is the directive that Neha Bora is refusing to follow.The Delhi high court judgment that followedIf you read the turgid prose of the 46-page judgment issued on October 23 from the pen of Justice Subramaniom Prasad (famous for being one of the judges who granted bail to the BJP politician and rapist Kuldeep Singh Sengar, a decision the Supreme Court stayed) you will discover that he finds nothing wrong with the fact that the SEM has not had the time to apply his mind independently to the question of whether Neha Bora’s actions constitute or can constitute ‘breach of peace’, or that he relies only on the notes made in the ‘kalandra’ furnished by one SI Vaishali Tushir, and on the ‘witness testimonies’ of three police personnel, including SI Tushir. In other words, the SEM, who is a police officer, is depending on the word of three other police personnel, to adjudicate whether or not Neha Bora can be asked to show cause as to why they should not sign a peace bond.The relatively recent practice of appointing police officers as special executive magistrates while they are on duty with the police has completely destroyed what little was left of the doctrine of the separation of powers during the undeclared emergency that we are living through at the moment.In practice, what this means is that a person who is a police officer by day, becomes a magistrate by evening, and then decides whether or not the police has been legally and procedurally correct in curtailing a citizen’s liberty, and then investigates the police’s conduct and the citizen’s behavior before passing judgment on the same. Not even a fig leaf of juridical propriety is maintained when the police get to play prosecutor, investigator and judge all at the same time.There is settled jurisprudence in this country that flows from a Supreme Court judgment in the famous Madhu Limaye case where the apex court laid down guard-rails about the timelines of enquiry and prosecution when it came to ‘peace bond’ instances. Justice Subramaniom Prasad knows that this is so, and cannot avoid referring to this, because Neha Bora’s advocate Gopal Sankaranarayan explicitly establishes that the guidelines given by the Supreme Court in Madhu Limaye have not been adhered to by SEM Meena while dealing with Neha.Justice Prasad is fully aware of what this means. All that he does to reflect on his awareness is to say that he hopes SEM Meena will now adhere to conducting an enquiry and follow the principles of natural justice. The fact that he has not done so, till now, is not seen as a reason to quash his notice.In the end, what Justice Prasad relies on to endorse Meena’s conduct is the presence of something called a ‘kalandra’.Of kalandras and kalandarsIn recent days, we have heard this word – that is both old and new – a fair amount. It also crops up in discussions of the ‘peace bonds’ that the CJP triumvirate, Dipke, Das and Ranka, did choose to sign, unlike Neha Bora.Simply put, a ‘kalandra’, describes a paper, or set of papers, that the police send up the chain of command when they want to either prevent something from happening, or someone from doing something. At best, it is an estimation of probabilities, at worst it is the trigger for a particularly grisly form of emotional blackmail. And it assumes that the police can see the future, like the ‘precogs’ in Minority Report. A kalandra is what the police write up when they don’t yet want to arrest someone, and at the same time prepare the grounds for arrest in the near future. It is often used in domestic disputes, neighbourhood quarrels, conflicts between tenants and landlords, and now, to help prevent activists from taking action.The word, derived from the Persian kalantar – who was a functionary, of some consequence, but not much importance, in Safavid Iran or Mughal Hindostan – has come to mean, in the Delhi Police’s colonial-era parlance, a memo or note, not exactly a report, alerting a magistrate with executive powers to the possibility that a breach of peace may be about to occur in a space within their jurisdiction. Between themselves, the kalandra and the peace bond are two medieval relics, drawn from vastly different legal histories, Mughal and English, that continue to haunt, like vampires, the living body of contemporary Indian criminal jurisprudence.We might note, in passing, that there is a strange adversarial correspondence between the kalandra as an instrument of control and the kalandar (or qalandar) as a figure historically outside the state’s control. Kalandar/Qalandar was, and still is, the name given to wandering sufi practitioners who deviate from the straight-and-narrow, dabble in magic, acrobatics, and fortune-telling, and tend, keep, and care for, wild animals. They practiced a form of vagabondage that managed to stay just outside the law, and this is why kalandra entries were maintained on them by local authorities, in case they were to be required to furnish good-conduct-bonds while passing through a region. Kalandars were attractive counter-weights of playful disobedience to settled imperial and ecclesiastical power. The practice of maintaining kalandras on kalandars may have begun the process of police/kotwal surveillance of all sorts of waywardness in pre-modern North India. It makes one think immediately of Neha and their comrades, this new generation of joyful rebels, as ‘dam-a-dam mast qalandars’. When the record of our times finally gets written up, they will have the pehla number.Anyways, coming back to the matter of contemporary procedures of control, the magistrate, upon examining the kalandra and initiating additional enquiries, may ask any person mentioned in the kalandra to show cause as to why they may not be required to offer a signed undertaking in the form of a ‘peace bond’; consisting of a certain sum of money, with surety, and assurance that that they will not breach the peace for a specified period of time. If they fail to abstain from committing what the magistrate feels, subjectively, is a ‘breach of peace’, they will forfeit the sum of money they had pledged, and may be arrested for breaking their bond. This is where the ‘blackmail’ part comes in.Say you’re a young person fed up of the way in which the regime is conducting itself, targeting young people, bulldozing habitations, protecting paper leakers or taking away your right to vote, and you set out to organise a small protest, with songs and colourful posters, with a lot of laughter and a modicum of rage, in the vicinity of your college. Then, out comes the SI with his or her kalandra, and in which they will mark what you did, what you said, whom you were with, and how many times you have done this before, what do people say about you and when might you do this again. These ‘notes’ which have a studied informality, which consist more of hearsay than actual evidence, go up the chain of command. And if those at a higher level of the chain of command feel necessary, they can send the shadow of the peace bond in your direction. This is exactly what happened to Neha Bora.Mandi House, October 16, 2026The judge notes Neha’s Instagram message on October 16.“See you today at Mandi House, 5 PM! Jantar Mantar is not a site that you can denotify, it’s a symbol of our resistance! Today, all of Central Delhi has become Jantar Mantar!”And then he notes, that the police machinery had already placed itself at the Mandi House circle in anticipation of Neha’s appearance. The police version of what follows, and the reasons for their action, are given in the kalandra. It merits a read.Kalandra written by SI Vaishali Tushir on 17/10/2026Act/Section1. The Bharatiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita(BNSS), 2023-Section 1262. The Bharatiya Nagrik Suraksha Sanhita(BNSS), 2023-Section 169Brief FactsThe brief kalandra is as follows: yesterday, on 16/10/2026, the SHO/BK Road and other police staff were deployed at the Mandi House roundabout to prevent violation of Section 163 BNSS during a CJP protest to be held there.Section 163 BNSS was in force in the New Delhi District area. At about 05:10 PM, Neha Bora (AISA President) arrived at the Mandi House roundabout with about 40-50-protesters and from there began moving towards Barakhamba Road raising slogans. They were repeatedly warned over a loudspeaker that Section 163 BNSS was in force in the area, that any kind of dharna, demonstration or procession, or any gathering of five or more persons, was unlawful there, and that they should disperse peacefully. However, Neha Bora (AISA President) continued to incite people and kept moving forward, inciting the public and her supporters while raising slogans such as “Reclaim Jantar Mantar”, “Gyanesh Kumar, resign” and “We do not accept any Section 163 BNSS, nor do we accept any such law.” Her supporters/protesters were stopped by the police after considerable effort.Neha Bora D/o Hoshiyar Singh has for quite some time been continuously holding demonstrations at Jantar Mantar, New Delhi, and the surrounding area despite Section 163 BNSS being in force, and has been involved in violations of Section 163 BNSS, in which principal members of the CJP have also taken part. Neha Bora has been involved in provoking and inciting people through her inflammatory language and social media posts, and several criminal cases have previously been registered against her in this regard, the details of which are attached. Neha Bora had called upon her supporters and members of the CJP to gather at Connaught Place on 16.10.2026 and hoist the Tiranga [national flag], for which no valid permission had been obtained. The police also had information and an apprehension that some anti-social elements might join her supporters and cause harm to life and property.Connaught Place is a highly commercial area where entry and exit routes are limited. When a crowd gathers, movement to other areas quickly becomes obstructed, and in an emergency it becomes difficult for people to get out. If the main roads nearby are closed, traffic in the entire area is likely to be affected. There are a large number of showrooms, hotels, banks, offices and vendors in this area. Any disruption in the evenings or on weekends can affect the livelihood of traders and their employees. The livelihood of lakhs of traders and their employees in this area depends on its peaceful and orderly functioning.Lakhs of people pass through Rajiv Chowk Metro Station every day. In such circumstances, the gathering of an additional crowd creates a risk of traffic jams and stampede-like situations. This area is also located near Parliament and the Central Secretariat. Because of old buildings and narrow lanes, the movement of ambulances and fire brigades is also likely to be affected. It is also noteworthy that Connaught Place is not a notified protest site.For the above reasons, prohibitory orders underSection 163 BNSS are in force in the area, and their violation may attract legal action. Incidents of violence and damage to property have also occurred at previous events of AISA and CJP.Neha Bora had already been informed of all the above facts and circumstances, and it had been clearly explained to her that any kind of demonstration, procession, rally or use of a loudspeaker in and around Connaught Place is prohibited.It is also noteworthy that, even before the incident of 16-10-2026, Neha Bora has been detained several times under Section 65 of the Delhi Police Act to prevent her from breaching the peace.Despite various FIRs having been registered, Neha Bora is not willing to cooperate with the police in maintaining law and order under any circumstances and keeps inciting people to unlawful assembly and demonstration. There is every likelihood that Neha Bora may, in the near future, again attempt to go with her associates to Jantar Mantar, Connaught Place and other prohibited places in New Delhi and try to provoke people. There is therefore a serious apprehension of breach of peace and law and order in the area, and a threat may arise to government property and to the life and property of the general public.It is also necessary to mention the past conduct and activities of the respondent. She has from time to time openly violated the law and has continuously incited her supporters and the general public to violate the law. She has been provoking the general public with the aim of creating distrust in rules, laws and prescribed procedures and of spreading anarchy. Therefore, in view of all the above facts and circumstances, the past conduct of the respondent Neha Bora, her previous involvement in such activities, and the information received that she had called on her supporters to gather and demonstrate at Connaught Place on 16.10.2026 without valid permission, a serious apprehension arose that if timely and necessary action is not taken against the respondent, she may in the near future again go to prohibited places, gather people, incite them to violate the law and breach the peace and law and order of the area. This may endanger the life and property of the general public and government and public property, and a cognizable offence may be committed.All the above facts, circumstances and the possible law-and-order situation were brought to the notice of senior officers, and the entire situation was placed before them. As directed by the senior officers and in accordance with the rules, action under Section 126/169 BNSS against the respondent was found necessary to prevent the commission of a possible cognizable offence and to maintain public peace and law and order.Therefore, the necessary documents and kalandra relating to the preventive action taken against the respondent Neha Bora D/o Hoshiyar Singh, R/o 20, Khetarpal Enclave, Amritsar, Punjab, have been prepared in accordance with the rules and are being submitted before the Hon’ble Court. The respondent may be bound down for the highest possible amount [literally “heaviest possible fine amount”; in context, the bond amount]. Sir, it is prayed that the necessary orders may kindly be passed in accordance with the rules. SI Vaishali TushirThe SEM’s orderBased on a reading of this kalandra, and his conversation with SI Vaishali Tushir, SEM Mahesh Kumar Meena, drafts an order, which reads as follows:17.10.2026 Today a Kalandra U/S 126/169 BNSS is submitted by IO/SI Vaishali Tushir, P.S. B.K. Road. After inspection of kalandra, the is accepted/Admitted by this court. Notice U/S 126/130 BNSS be issued to respondent and sent to police station B.K. Road for compliance. Put up on 19.10.2026.”The high court judge, Justice Subramaniom Prasad, records the SEM’s full order in his judgement, and it is as follows:ORDERSHO/B.K.Road. New Delhi has sent a Kalandra u/s 126/169 BNSS through I.O./SI Vaishali Tushir. I have carefully gone through the police report/kalandra which shows that Neha Bora D/o Hoshiyar Singh R/o H. No. 25, Meena Bagh, Maulana Azad Road, Delhi, created nuisance by shouting loudly in protest at round about Mandi House and she has already been involved in repeated protest related activity in and around Jantar Mantra, New Delhi, despite prohibitory orders 163 BNSS. She instigated people to participate in unauthorized demonstration at Central Park, Connaught Place which is not a designated protest site and also hoist the national flag without obtaining valid permission. There is every likelihood of apprehension of breach of public peace and tranquility within the jurisdiction of this court. I.O/SI Vaishali Tushir is present and briefs the facts of Kalandra. From the reason recorded above. I have reached to the conclusion that there is sufficient grounds to initiate proceedings against the respondent u/s- 126/169 BNSS. I, therefore, order that notice u/s- 126/130 BNSS be given to the respondent asking him (sic) as to why she should not be required to execute Personal/Surety Bond in the sum of Rs.10,000/- with one surety in the like amount to keeping peace for a period of one year. Notice is being issued for appearance. The case has been fixed for 19.10.2026.”It is after this that the show cause notice is issued. The paper chain starts with the kalandra, moves to the order, and finally to the show-cause notice. At no stage in this process does the SEM examine any witnesses other than police personnel, at no stage is Neha Bora asked to give their version of what happened, and no ‘investigation’ independent of what has been reported in the kalandra is conducted by anybody. And yet, the ‘show cause’ notice is sent. We might ask, what about a ‘show cause’ for the ‘show cause’? And clearly, there isn’t any cause other than the SEM’s point that he thinks that Neha, “created nuisance by shouting loudly in protest”. Would there have been less of an objection, less of an apprehension of the ‘breach of peace’ if the volume of Neha’s voice had been somewhat attenuated? Should protestors whisper their slogans?The kalandra cited is a series of assumptions – that Neha was going to Connaught Place (which Neha had not said in the Instagram message, which mentioned only Mandi House, which the judge knows, because he has recorded it in the text of his judgment.). That the protestors would disturb the people working in hotels, shops, or traveling in the metro. That they would prevent shopkeepers from going about their business and cause traffic jams and stampedes. All of these are estimations. Going by previous experience, it is not the young people who have been protesting against the SIR (Neha included) who have caused any violence, either in Connaught Place, or in Jantar Mantar, or in Mandi House. The people who have been documented, on camera, using violence, and raising violent slogans, are the counter protestors, the men of extreme right-wing militias like the Hindu Raksha Dal, who have attacked isolated protestors and even passers-by, whenever they have been able to lay their hands on them, while raising slogans in support of Delhi Police.No SI of any police station has sent any kalandra to any SEM regarding any counter-protestor, as of now. If they had, we would have heard about it. And ‘show-cause’ notices sent to members of the Hindu Raksha Dal as to why they are not signing peace bonds would have been in the news. And if they had been sent such notices, and if individuals associated with the extreme-right had signed such notices, then too, we would have known about it. That hasn’t happened.A necessary flashback to 2020Let us jog, or stretch, our memory just a little. On February 29, 2029, a mob of reportedly as many as 1200 people led by BJP MLA (now minister) Kapil Mishra, marched through Connaught Place, lit torches in hand, and the occasional tricolour flag, loudly proclaiming, ‘Desh Ke Gaddaron Ko, Goli Maro Salon Ko’ (‘Shoot to Kill the Traitors of the Country’). This happened even as violence, instigated by Mishra himself, in the presence of an ACP of Delhi Police, (he had said, famously, ‘we will take the law into our hands if the roads are not cleared of the anti-CAA protestors’) had been ongoing in North Eastern Delhi for the previous three days. The city was on edge.Connaught Place – with the same shops, hotels, metro station and crowds that SI Vaishali Tushir is so attentive to in her kalandra – was under Section 144 of the CrPC (what is today Section 163 of the BNSS), which forbids the gathering of five or more people in a public place. No ‘police permission’ had been taken for this march and no ‘permission’ was taken for the display of the national flag either. This was a gathering that was clear, and unapologetic, about loudly raising violent slogans. There was no ‘show cause’ notice, no talk of any ‘peace bond’ because clearly, the Delhi Police saw that event as part and parcel of the ‘King’s Peace’. Kapil Mishra, who called this event a ‘Peace March’ even though it resounded with war cries, has till date, not had to sign a peace-bond.‘Hum Bond Sign Nahin Karenge’ is to the Anti-SIR moment of 2026 what ‘Hum Kagaz Nahin Dikhayenge’ (‘we will not show our papers’) was to the Anti-CAA moment of 2019-2020; two forms of intransigence made glorious by the calm strength of the bearers of both these refusals.The crowd successfully mobilised by Kapil Mishra in Connaught Place on February 29, 2020 was motivated to enact violence, really and symbolically, on those who said ‘we will not show papers.’ The call that Neha Bora made on October 16, 2026 was to assemble peacefully, even joyously, in defence of democracy. Neha was prevented from being part of the gathering and whisked away in a van, in the company of policemen who had pretended to be protestors in order to waylay Neha in the crowd. And yet, the former event, did not give rise to apprehensions about breach of peace, while the latter, in which it was the police, not the protestors, that acted with duplicity and guile, did. And so a kalandra was made out, an order issued, a ‘show cause’ notice despatched, and the text of a ‘peace bond’ made, and kept ready.An October afternoon montageEven as Neha, Anjali and Danish, all three AISA activists, were winding up their impromptu press conference on Saturday, October 24 from a simple table with a white table cloth in a Meena Bagh lawn, the home minister of the largest leaking democracy in the world (which haemorrhages voters with each special intensive revision of the electoral rolls) was beginning a three hour long police conference with the hierarchy of Delhi Police at their headquarters. Perhaps they were deliberating what to do next as Delhi slides into the long winter of our discontent.The new Delhi Police HQ stands almost directly opposite the barricaded edifice of the Central Election Commission. Perhaps Gyanesh Kumar, (‘Gyanu’ to the protestors) the CEC himself, might have found a moment or two to look outside his window into the general direction of the home minister’s police conference, in search of a tiny bit of assurance.What a cinematic sequence or montage it could make; imagine intercuts between a pensive, suited-booted, bureaucrat turned vote-thief, a worried home minister in a suitably shiny saffron kurta, a roomful of servile policemen in khaki, and a smiling rebel in a cherry red salwar kameez. In locations not far from each other on a mellow autumn afternoon when the city hits ‘pause’ in the middle of a calendar of protests. Meanwhile, the man at the top of the dung heap of power, the prime minister himself, spent an afternoon chatting to the AI avatar of a dead baba on a stage, like a zombie talking to a ghost, because he has nothing better to do then dish out AI slop.In this image posted on Oct. 24, 2026, Union Home Minister Amit Shah and Delhi Chief Minister Rekha Gupta during a review meeting at Delhi Police Headquarters, in New Delhi. (@PTI_News/X via PTI Photo)His fixer, the man in the saffron kurta at the top-end of the long table at the conference room in the police headquarters, sat, all furrowed-brow and pale-face, under the larger-than-life portrait of his supposed exemplar, Sardar Patel, India’s first home minister. His countenance, even in a mute and glossy PR video issued by Delhi Police, betrayed a degree of anxiety. He has reason to be anxious. He knows that hi-tech seances won’t do anything to assuage restive citizens. He knows that the protests are going to grow, that Delhi will once again be a battlefield between the might of an armed constabulary and unarmed citizens.He knows, more than anyone else, that the smiling rebel’s disdain is contagious. It expresses the self-evident truth that young people in India seem to be less-and-less afraid, each day, of the violence that the state throws at them while protecting the pensive vote-thief. If now, after the ‘we will not sign’ moment, they begin to care less-and-less about threats that come wrapped in the legalese of ‘show-cause notices’ then the judges, the policemen, the prosecutors, the persecutors, the people in power, the people who warm their pockets by tucking the people in power into them – all will have things to worry about.Neha’s peaceIn a text published in the Indian Express that day (October 24) Neha elaborated this position of principled refusal as a stance that emanates from the truth of what peaceful protestors have been facing on the streets of Delhi.“…And then there is what happened to us on the streets. We were repeatedly stopped, dragged, detained and prevented from reaching protest sites. I have been physically manhandled by police personnel and have shown the scratches and bruises left on my body. Other women protesters and journalists have also alleged police misconduct. On October 16, I was detained at Mandi House and remained in police custody overnight. And after all this, I was served a notice suggesting that I was likely to breach the peace.“Are my slogans demanding Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation, rollback of SIR and repealing the 2023 EC appointment Act likely to breach the peace? During the protests against the NEET paper leak, I sat on a 23-day-long hunger strike, choosing to endure hunger myself in the hope that our demands for justice would be heard. I have never sought to disturb peace. I have only refused to accept that peace requires us to remain silent in the face of injustice. The grounds reported in the notice point to protests, slogans and gatherings, not violence committed by me. Meanwhile, photographs, videos and accounts document the force used against protesters, including myself.“I am being asked to prove that I will maintain peace, while the violence we have experienced at the hands of those entrusted with maintaining public order is left without similar accountability. What, then, have we begun to understand by peace? Is peace simply the absence of people on the streets? Is it the silence that follows when protesters have been dispersed, detained or frightened into staying home? Can we call a society peaceful because those experiencing injustice have been prevented from speaking about it?”The fundamental question here is about the kind of ‘peace’ that the ‘peace bond’ offers. Neha gives those in power a brief history lesson in the same text –“History offers us a troubling understanding of peace. The Roman Empire celebrated what came to be known as Pax Romana, or Roman Peace. It was associated with stability and order, but sustained also through slavery, conquest, military domination and the suppression of resistance. The peace celebrated by those who ruled was not necessarily experienced as peace by those subjected to their power. Is it possible, then, to impose order without creating justice? To silence resistance without addressing the suffering that gives rise to it. To declare peace while leaving untouched the inequality and violence on which that peace rests. But surely this cannot be our understanding of peace in a democratic republic.”A peace that papers over inequality and violence is not peace, it is only a quiet interval in an ongoing war that a regime imposes on its people. And a ‘Peace Bond’ is actually a ‘Prisoner of War Bond’, it mandates that a person, once identified by the ruling power, submit themselves to that power, and undertake to abide by that power’s definition of peace, tranquility and order. It transfers the subjective understanding of one’s own conduct from one’s own person to an officer of the state.A brief history of the peace bondThe origins of the ‘Peace Bond’ lie in the idea of the defence of the ‘King’s Peace’ in 10th and 11th century England, and then expands, through the office of the ‘Keepers of the Peace’ to ‘Justices of the Peace’ through the ‘Justice of the Peace Act’ (1361 CE) during the reign of King Edward III.It may be noted that Edward III felt compelled to introduce this law in the wake of the wake of the ‘Black Death’, or plague epidemic of 1346-1348 CE, which devastated Europe and England on a far greater scale than we know from the Covid-19 Pandemic in our own time. The ‘Black Death’ led to a huge labour shortage, and gave rise to demands for better wages by workers and agricultural labourers. The landowning aristocrats put pressure on the monarchy to defend their interests giving rise to the first laws against workers organising to demand better conditions – these include the ‘Ordinance of Labourers’ (1349) and the ‘Statute of Labourers’ (1351) which froze wages to levels they were at before the outbreak of the plague in 1346, and made it illegal for labourers to move, or to refuse to work. There was a sudden rise in local skirmishes between labourers, tenant farmers and owners of land. And it is to control this spike in social turbulence that the Justices of the Peace Act was promulgated in 1361. Thing went out of control, and the intense pressures in the countryside triggered the great Peasant Uprising of 1381, during which the rebels, drawn from the ranks of peasants and workers, targeted Justices of the Peace and burnt manorial court rolls – the archives where the records of who had signed which ‘peace bond’ was kept.This medieval English legal invention, which came into being before modern police and prison systems, became one of the most lethal instruments of repression in the hands of the state. Just as the Magna Carta has left as its legacy for all legal systems derived from English law the writ of Habeas Corpus – which allows us to ask why a person has been detained without cause – so too, at the other end, the ‘Peace Bond’ is the means by which the state takes away the very power that the people gain in Habeas Corpus. The peace bond does something extremely insidious. It doesn’t require a person to be arrested. It simply replicates the loss of liberty that arrest leads to, even before a person is arrested. By agreeing to the egregious conditions of not committing ‘breach of peace’, the peace bond makes its object their own policeman, magistrate and jailor. Once you have signed the Peace Bond, you will think ten times about what you will and can do, because your signature has planted the policeman and the jailor in your own soul. You become the king’s, or the regime’s, vassal more than you retain the status of a free citizen.During the 15th and 16th centuries, especially in Tudor times, the scope and operation of the act expands considerably and it is used by the king’s magistrates to control vagrancy, enforce discipline and keep potentially dangerous or disorderly individuals under surveillance, even without prior criminal conviction.It comes as no surprise to know that the means by which this act was used to prevent dissent was a method exported to the colonies as Britain became an empire. It was used extensively in North America, before the American Revolution, in Ireland, in India, and in Africa. The Peace Bond was used by the British state against suffragettes (which marks an interesting continuity with its current usage against women activists defending their right to vote), pacifists and war-resisters, against Fenians (Irish Republicans) trade unionists, and of course anti-colonial activists, especially in India. Kenya is one of the few former British colonies to have completely done away with the ignominy of the Peace Bond. In the landmark case Constitutional Petition 45 of 2014, the High Court of Kenya ruled that sections 43 to 61A of Kenya’s Criminal Procedure Code—which allowed courts to compel individuals to sign a bond to keep the peace—were unconstitutional. The High Court struck down the practice, declaring it a colonial-era relic originally utilized by British authorities to arbitrarily detain citizens and suppress dissenting voices without formal charges or trials.Modified, privatised versions of the peace bond have been used in industrial conflict situations, including in India. During the intense unrest that took place in the Maruti-Suzuki Plant in Manesar, Haryana in 2011, the management deployed a highly controversial measure – the mandatory issuance of ‘good conduct bonds’ – which every worker was asked to sign. The company refused to let any worker enter the premises of the factory until they signed it. This was one of the reasons why the workers went on strike in 2011. The tension in the factory simmered until they exploded in July 2012, following which, hundreds of workers were arrested and made subject to long and arduous prison sentences. It may be noted that the current Congress president, Mallikarjun Kharge, who was at that time minister for labour in the Manmohan Singh cabinet, had said in a response to questions in parliament, that the imposition of ‘good conduct bonds’ on workers in factories amounted to an unfair labour practice as per the provisions of the Industrial Disputes Act of 1947.However, the ‘good conduct / peace bond’ continues to linger in our context as a colonial spectre possessing the body of a post-colonial legal apparatus through sections 126 to 130 in chapter IX of the BNSS (Bharatiya Nyaya Suraksha Samhita of 2023). It is arbitrarily tethered to an idea of ‘peace’ and its antagonist, ‘disruption’, that is convenient to the ruling regime. By this token, the forbidding of assemblies of five or more peaceable individuals, is peace. The imposition of 43,000 police and paramilitary forces on India’s capital is peace. The shutting down of 45 metro stations in Delhi is peace. The cancellation of trains to Delhi is peace. And the arbitrary detention of many young, unarmed protestors, inflicting violence on their bodies, their continued harassment, and surveillance, is peace.On the other hand, young, unarmed, peaceful protestors exercising their constitutionally protected right to peaceful assembly and expression is ‘breach of peace’.What does the peace bond do to democracy?The essential objection to any form of the ‘peace bond’ is that it drastically curtails the fundamental human rights to move, to assemble, to associate with others, to organise, educate or agitate peacefully against any form of political or social oppression. The ‘peace bond’ assumes, unilaterally, and without substantive evidence, that such actions will constitute a ‘breach of peace’. This takes away, in a roundabout manner, the constitutional rights given to any citizen. It makes, in fact, a mockery of the idea of citizenship in a democratic polity. What the disenfranchisement of voters from the electoral rolls does to an actual election (it prevents people who are voters from voting) the peace bond does in actual, everyday political life. Through it, the state tells a citizen, whosoever it chooses to have sign the bond, that their free exercise of political rights is now subject to conditional approval from the state. If the state so desires, the citizen, for all practical purposes, can be made to cease being an active, conscious member of society. It is a form of ‘house arrest of the mind and the will’ that has absolutely no place in a democratic society.We may debate what measures a state can take against a citizen if they have actually indulged in disruptive activity, if they have used violence, obstructed public services and conveniences, or made a nuisance of themselves in a way that is offensive to others. But to say that we accept the state’s power to ‘predict’ and ‘prevent’ what a citizen has not even done is to accept that citizens have no will and agency, and that the state will decide what is permissible or not, even when no public disruption or violence has occurred.We cannot, as citizens of a democratic republic, let such a state of affairs take hold. The compact between the state and citizens in a democracy lies in the acceptance of the idea that citizens will openly, transparently, peacefully express their grievances, even to the extent of demanding that a regime that has outlived its compact with the people be changed. A democracy is such not just because citizens do this, but also because a state accepts that this is normal. Once the state stops accepting this as normal, and begins relying on ‘bonds’ to keep the ‘King’s Peace’ it has automatically outlived a democratic compact with its people. We are now at that stage.If, on the one hand, the refusal to accept disenfranchisement is a struggle to defend one aspect of citizenship, the refusal to sign ‘peace bonds’ at a time when the state wages war on its people, is another kind of struggle, to defend another aspect of citizenship. It is timely, and pertinent, that both these struggles have now become co-incident. And following from the example of Neha Bora’s instinctive, but also well thought, refusal, we can all straighten our spines ever so slightly, and say, if and when asked, ‘We will not sign the bond’.