For 34 days, students sat at Jantar Mantar – braving humid nights, thinning rations, and the particular fatigue of being young and simply asking your government to tell the truth. What finally ended the sit-in was not an admission or an answer. It was attrition, five weeks of wearing people down, followed by a resignation that let everyone else exhale and move on. What remained, however, as the tents came down, is a quieter and more damning story. It showed how little institutional weight stood behind these students when it mattered most, and how much of it they had to build themselves, march by march, slogan by slogan, while much of the country was told there was nothing to see.The police’s use of lathis and pellet gunsLet’s begin with what is no longer seriously in dispute. Delhi Police used lathis – some allegedly fitted with nails – to break up a march. The claim that no pellet guns were fired, made more than once on the floor of Parliament, does not survive the paper trail. A general diary entry at the Parliament Street police station recorded that the Rapid Action Force (RAF) fired anti-riot guns and plastic pellets on a DCP’s instruction; a medico-legal report corroborated pellet wounds in at least one protester.A senior counsel before the Supreme Court went further, arguing that what doctors pulled from injured bodies were not standard rubber rounds but harder, metallic projectiles capable of the organ-deep damage pellet munitions are known to inflict. One young man is reported to be carrying roughly 200 pellets in his body, some close enough to the heart to worry his surgeons, with a real risk of losing his sight – a boy who went to a protest and may spend a lifetime living with the consequences of someone else’s order.Two officers linked to the operation have been quietly reshuffled; an internal inquiry drags on even as the force’s account keeps shifting. Strip away the argument over munition classification and one fact remains: a peaceful, constitutionally protected assembly met with force built to blind and maim, and the state’s first reflex was to deny it happened, not explain itself.Into this walked Rahul Gandhi, who sat for eight hours outside a police station to force registration of an FIR – a gesture worth dwelling on precisely because it should never have been necessary. The Supreme Court’s Constitution Bench in Lalita Kumari v. Government of Uttar Pradesh (2014) settled the question after decades of drift: an FIR must be registered under Section 154 of the CrPC – carried forward in the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS) – the instant information discloses a cognisable offence. A preliminary inquiry is allowed only in a short, named list of situations – matrimonial disputes, commercial matters with a civil flavour, corruption, medical negligence, unexplained delay – and even there it must be swift.Registering an FIR does not condemn anyone in advance; it merely sets the machinery moving, and an accused keeps every safeguard against a vexatious case, including quashing under the well-worn Bhajan Lal (1992) guidelines. Lodging an FIR, put simply, is the cheapest, least discretionary thing a police station can do, and refusing to do it is not caution – it is unlawful. What follows is a separate and harder question. But to deny the FIR itself is not procedure. It is obstruction wearing procedure’s clothes.When the press stops holding power to accountPerhaps the least discussed failure of these five weeks, and in some ways the most corrosive, is how little the national television or print media had to say about any of it. Independent YouTube channels and social media did the work that ought to have been television’s or of newspapers. A 34-day sit-in, a pellet-gun dispute that reached the Supreme Court, an opposition leader camped outside a thana – together they drew less prime-time attention than a film opening or a cricket spat would command.When national broadcasters and journalists look away, or repeat the government’s denials as if repetition were reporting, citizens are left to reassemble the truth from court filings, fact-checks, and phone footage – a poor substitute for a press whose purpose is to test official claims against evidence. Kapil Sibal put it starkly in a recent lecture: when the press stops holding power to account, and the judiciary treats its own comfort as more urgent than a citizen’s liberty, democracy loses both instruments meant to restrain majoritarian excess at once.Not that the Supreme Court looked away entirely. It heard the pellet-gun plea, ordered the Union government to preserve RAF ammunition logs, directed medical care for the injured, and eventually set up a Special Investigation Team (SIT). But to students who had already given weeks of their lives to a pavement, each step arrived late, narrow, and only after a hospital record or a leaked police diary entry made denial impossible to sustain.Even the SIT sits uneasily. One member, a former Delhi high court judge, was on the bench that repeatedly refused bail to Umar Khalid and others held for years without trial in the 2020 Delhi riots case – a record many in the bar read as emblematic of the very state overreach this panel must now investigate impartially. Less contentious names beside this one do not dissolve the unease; since suspicion exists. It’s perception that matters!Meanwhile the government has still not handed the court the list of “hardened criminals” it promised to exempt from FIR withdrawal, leaving ordinary students who merely stood at a protest entangled in cases they were told would be closed. A state that can produce ammunition logs under court pressure can surely produce a list of names.For the students, exhaustion will tempt one of two extremes: disperse quietly, or threaten, as some already do for September, an indefinite nationwide agitation. What actually moved this dispute – ammunition logs preserved, medical care directed, the SIT formed, the Court’s oral word that FIRs against genuine protesters can be withdrawn – came from patient, documented legal pressure, not the sheer size of a crowd. Therefore wiser course would be to keep pressure alive: insist the promised list is filed, watch what the SIT actually reports rather than who sits on it, and use RTI and medical records to build a public record that big media may ignore but a court cannot. Street protests have their place, but they work best as a companion to the paperwork, not a substitute for it.For the government, the ask is unglamorous but overdue: hand over the list of excluded criminals it promised the court, publish a clear standard on when pellet-firing weapons may be used against unarmed civilians, and stop letting denial outrun the record. Each time a diary entry or hospital chart contradicts a minister’s word in Parliament, then faith in that institution, not just that one incident, is spent a little further.More important than all – do not go back on what has been promised for that destroys credibility for all future talks.A wound that runs deeper than policyThere is a wound here that runs deeper than policy. India’s youth feel let down by those meant to guide them toward something better, and find instead a state that turns strangely heartless the moment it is questioned. An Urdu couplet says it more honestly than any editorial can:Zakhm dikhāte rahe hum, aur woh insāf ginte rahe, ab tak faisla nahin, ab tak hum khade hain(We kept showing our wounds, and they kept counting out justice – the verdict still hasn’t come, and we are still standing).That, in the end, is what these 34 days actually proved: the students did not stop standing. The police used force meant to maim; ministers denied it from the floor of Parliament; main TV and newspapers abandoned them, the courts moved at the unhurried pace courts move at. And still they stood, still they asked – for FIRs to be honoured, for a promised list to be produced, for a judge’s presence on a panel to be explained without evasion. That persistence, not any institution’s belated response to it, is the story India should be watching, for current apathy will surely bring them back on the street. And come back they will, and this time with just not a catchy meme but a song that could well capture national imagination, and then the price will be heavy.Najeeb Jung is a former civil servant who was also the Vice Chancellor of Jamia Millia Islamia and Lt. Governor of Delhi. He is currently the chairman of the Advanced Studies Institute of Asia.