On July 20, the long-running protest at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar took a dramatic turn. For nearly three weeks, an uneasy calm had prevailed around the indefinite fast of Sonam Wangchuk and three students demanding accountability for repeated examination leaks and the resignation of Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan. The original permission to assemble had long since expired, yet, curiously, the police allowed the protest to continue, perhaps calculating that it would eventually lose momentum.Instead, the opposite happened. The crowds went on swelling, attracting wider public attention and even support from mainstream opposition parties, the state’s response changed. On the eve of the proposed march to Parliament, Wangchuk was forcibly removed from the protest site and taken to Safdarjung Hospital. The action provoked widespread outrage. The following day, thousands converged at Jantar Mantar, determined to march towards the parliament. They were met with tear gas, lathi charges and mass detentions. Simultaneously, in Mumbai, students attempting to organise a solidarity march to Chaitya Bhoomi, the site of Ambedkar memorial, were detained before their demonstration could even begin.A Delhi Police personnel throws a tear gas shell during a march towards Parliament demanding the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over irregularities in the NEET examination and expressing support for climate activist Sonam Wangchuk, near Parliament House, at the Windsor Place roundabout, Le Méridien hotel, in New Delhi, Monday, July 20, 2026. Photo: PTI/Atul Yadav.The constitutional paradoxFor most observers, these events represented yet another instance of police excess. They are indeed that. But they also expose a much deeper constitutional question: why must citizens seek police permission to protest against their own government? More fundamentally, can the sovereign people of a democratic republic be required to obtain the executive’s permission before exercising their sovereignty?The question appears absurd when stated plainly. Yet it describes the everyday reality of Indian democracy. Every political organisation, trade union, student body or citizens’ collective wishing to hold a public demonstration is routinely instructed to obtain prior police permission. Permission may be granted, delayed, restricted, hedged with conditions or refused altogether. If a gathering proceeds without permission, it is readily declared “unlawful”, furnishing the legal pretext for dispersal, detention and criminal prosecution. What should have been regarded as an extraordinary restriction upon democratic freedom has become accepted as ordinary administrative procedure.Consider the paradox. The constitution opens with the declaration, “We, the People of India.” Sovereignty does not reside in parliament, the prime minister, the cabinet, or the police. It resides in the people themselves. Governments possess no independent authority; they derive their legitimacy from the temporary delegation of power by the sovereign citizenry. Elections do not transfer sovereignty to rulers. They merely authorise governments to exercise limited powers on behalf of those who remain sovereign.If that constitutional principle is taken seriously, the prevailing practice becomes deeply puzzling. Why should the principal require permission from its agent? Why should those from whom all state authority ultimately flows have to seek the state’s approval before assembling to criticise the manner in which that authority is exercised?Imagine a company in which shareholders were required to obtain the managing director’s permission before convening a meeting to question his performance. No student of corporate governance would hesitate to describe such an arrangement as absurd. Yet this is precisely the logic that has become normalised in Indian public life. Citizens who are constitutionally sovereign must first persuade the police that they deserve permission to express dissatisfaction with the government.The absurdity is so familiar that it rarely provokes reflection. Instead, public debate generally begins from the opposite assumption. Whenever a protest is dispersed, the first question asked is whether the organisers had permission. If the answer is negative, many conclude that the police action was justified. The burden of justification has silently shifted. Instead of asking why the state prevented citizens from exercising a fundamental democratic right, we ask why citizens exercised that right without official approval.This inversion has profound consequences. It transforms a constitutional right into an administrative privilege. The right to assemble ceases to exist independently of executive discretion. Protest is no longer presumed to be lawful unless demonstrably threatening public order; rather, it becomes unlawful unless affirmatively licensed by the very authority against which the protest is often directed. The executive thus acquires, in practice, a veto over one of the principal means through which citizens hold it accountable.Such a system sits uneasily with the very idea of democracy. The right to peaceful assembly is not merely another civil liberty. It occupies a special place in constitutional life because it is one of the primary means through which the people periodically reassert sovereignty that they temporarily delegate at elections. Voting enables citizens to choose governments. Public assembly enables them to supervise those governments between elections. If the executive can determine when, where and whether that supervision may occur, the relationship between the state and the citizen is fundamentally altered.Of course, no democratic society can permit unrestricted occupation of every public space or ignore genuine threats to public order. Roads cannot be blocked indefinitely. Hospitals must remain accessible. Violence cannot masquerade as protest. The real question is not whether assemblies may be regulated. It is something more fundamental: who possesses the constitutional authority to decide when regulation ends and suppression begins?That question takes us beyond the events at Jantar Mantar. It forces us to ask where the requirement of police permission originated, why independent India retained it after colonial rule, and whether a practice inherited from an empire is compatible with the constitutional promise that the people – not the government – are sovereign. How did the sovereign become a licensee?The common assumption that protests require police permission is so deeply embedded in public consciousness that few people pause to ask: where does this requirement actually come from?The answer is surprising. The constitution nowhere states that citizens must obtain police permission before exercising their right to peaceful assembly.Article 19(1)(b) unequivocally guarantees to every citizen “the right to assemble peaceably and without arms.” Like freedom of speech, this is recognised as a fundamental right, not as a privilege granted by the executive. The constitution does not say that the exercise of this right is contingent upon obtaining prior approval from the police.The qualification appears in Article 19(3), which permits the state to impose “reasonable restrictions” in the interests of sovereignty, integrity, and public order. Yet there is a crucial constitutional distinction between regulating the exercise of a right and licensing its exercise. Regulation presupposes that the right already exists and seeks only to harmonise it with other legitimate public interests. Licensing reverses the relationship. It presumes that the right cannot be exercised until the executive grants its approval.The legal foundations of the permission regime are not primarily constitutional. They are statutory and administrative, direct inheritances from colonial rule. The British Empire had compelling reasons to fear public assemblies. Nationalist meetings, workers’ demonstrations and political processions threatened an alien government whose authority rested not upon democratic consent but upon imperial domination. Following the Revolt of 1857, the colonial state reorganised policing through the Police Act of 1861, creating a force designed less to serve the public than to maintain political order. The district magistrate and the police commissioner became central figures in this architecture of preventive control.Security personnel stop a young man near Jantar Mantar ahead of a protest march, in New Delhi, Monday, July 20, 2026. Photo: PTI/Karma Bhutia.Independent India retained much of this machinery almost intact. Although several states enacted new police legislation after Independence, the underlying philosophy changed remarkably little. Commissioners of police and district magistrates continued to enjoy extensive powers to regulate public meetings, prescribe routes for processions, impose conditions and prohibit assemblies in the name of public order. Over time, these regulatory powers gradually evolved into a routine expectation that organisers must first obtain police permission before any significant public protest.An even more powerful instrument emerged through the widespread use of prohibitory orders under Section 144 of the Code of Criminal Procedure, now substantially carried forward as Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita (BNSS). Originally conceived as an emergency measure to deal with imminent threats to public tranquillity, these provisions increasingly became tools of preventive governance. Instead of responding to actual disorder, authorities began invoking them on the anticipation that disorder might occur. In practice, this often enabled the executive to prohibit assemblies before they had even taken place.The result has been a subtle but profound transformation. The constitutional right remains formally intact, but its exercise increasingly depends upon prior administrative approval. The language of rights survives; the practice resembles licensing.The Supreme Court has, on several occasions, recognised the danger of this drift. As early as Himat Lal K. Shah v. Commissioner of Police (1973), the court held that while the state may regulate public meetings to ensure public order, it cannot confer arbitrary discretion upon the police to prohibit them altogether. Public streets, the Court observed, are not the exclusive domain of the executive. Citizens possess a constitutional right to use them for peaceful political expression, subject only to reasonable regulation.That distinction should have become the cornerstone of democratic policing. Instead, administrative practice gradually moved in the opposite direction.More recently, in Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan v. Union of India (2018), while dealing with protests at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, the Supreme Court reaffirmed that peaceful protest is an essential feature of constitutional democracy. At the same time, it emphasised the need to balance this right with the interests of residents and commuters. The judgment reflected a familiar judicial dilemma: how to reconcile democratic freedoms with competing public claims.Yet there is a danger in the language of balancing itself. Every government invokes public order. Every administration insists that traffic must flow, schools must function and hospitals must remain accessible. These are legitimate concerns. But if “public order” becomes an elastic concept capable of justifying almost any restriction, the exception quietly swallows the rule. A right that exists only when the executive finds it convenient is no longer a meaningful right.Security personnel stop protesters as they raise slogans near Jantar Mantar ahead of a protest march, in New Delhi, Monday, July 20, 2026. Photo: PTI.This is precisely what has happened over the past several decades. Police permission has ceased to be an administrative mechanism for coordinating competing uses of public space. It has increasingly become an instrument for filtering political dissent. Demonstrations supporting government policies rarely encounter insurmountable procedural obstacles. Demonstrations challenging those policies often find themselves delayed, relocated, restricted or denied permission altogether. The law, neutral in its language, becomes selective in its operation.The events at Jantar Mantar illustrate this selective logic with remarkable clarity. The authorities did not immediately disperse the protest when the original permission expired. The indefinite fast continued for days, obviously with political connivance. The decisive moment came only when the protest threatened to leave its designated enclosure and march towards Parliament. The issue was not simply the expiry of permission. It was the prospect of dissent becoming politically visible at the seat of national power. This exposes the real function of the contemporary permission regime. It is less concerned with whether citizens may protest than with where, when and in what manner their protest may acquire political significance. Jantar Mantar itself increasingly resembles a constitutional theatre in which dissent is permitted so long as it remains geographically confined and politically contained. Protest is tolerated within the enclosure allocated to it, but the moment it seeks to occupy spaces where power is actually exercised, the vocabulary of permission gives way to the language of law and order and in corollary, police violence.From regulation to executive vetoNo government willingly encourages protest against itself. That is axiomatic. Governments exist to govern, and organised dissent challenges both their authority and their legitimacy. The real constitutional question, however, is whether they should possess the power to determine when, where and how citizens may publicly oppose them.In theory, the permission regime exists to facilitate the orderly exercise of constitutional freedoms. In practice, it has increasingly evolved into an instrument through which the executive manages the visibility, reach and political impact of dissent. The distinction is crucial. A democratic state may regulate assemblies to protect public order; it cannot use regulation to neutralise political opposition. Yet this is precisely the direction in which the Indian system has steadily drifted.Whatever the intentions behind these constitutional provisos, they have been systematically exploited to strengthen executive power through the coercive machinery of the police. This evolution also helps explain the entrenched nexus between politicians, the police and criminal elements that has become a defining feature of Indian public life. Increasingly, the boundaries between political authority, policing and organised coercion have blurred, transforming institutions meant to protect citizens into instruments for controlling them.The police response to the students’ march in Delhi offered a disturbing illustration of this transformation. Numerous videos appeared to show police personnel without visible name badges or identification numbers, while others seemed to depict civilians wielding police lathis alongside uniformed personnel. Whether these individuals were plainclothes policemen, civilians acting with official connivance, or hired muscle remains a matter requiring investigation. But the images themselves raised a deeply troubling question: had the police begun to resemble street goons, or had street goons been absorbed into the policing of democratic dissent? Either possibility is profoundly corrosive of the rule of law.The transformation has been gradual rather than dramatic. Rarely does the police commissioner prohibit every protest outright. Instead, control is exercised through a multitude of administrative techniques that appear innocuous when viewed individually but become formidable when deployed together. Permission is delayed until the proposed date has passed. The venue is shifted to a remote location where the protest attracts little public attention. Conditions are imposed that make meaningful mobilisation impossible. Restrictions on numbers, routes, timings and sound systems steadily diminish the protest’s effectiveness. When organisers nevertheless proceed, they are accused of violating conditions and become liable to arrest. The executive thus acquires what amounts to an indirect veto while preserving the appearance of constitutional legality.This is not regulation in the ordinary sense. It is a form of prior restraint. In constitutional law, prior restraint traditionally refers to state action that prevents speech before it is expressed rather than punishing unlawful conduct after the event. The same principle applies to assembly. If the executive can prevent citizens from gathering before any breach of public order has occurred, the freedom of assembly becomes contingent upon executive approval. The constitutional right survives in theory while disappearing in practice.Anand Teltumbde is a former CEO of Petronet and professor at IIT Kharagpur and GIM, Goa. He is also a writer and civil rights activist.