August 22, 2026
Since late July, the Supreme Court of India has been doing something unusual even by its own standards: legislating in real time, hearing by hearing, on how the Indian state should respond when tens of thousands of young people take to the streets at once. The trigger was the July 20 ‘Sansad Chalo’ march organised by the Cockroach Janata Party, the meme-fuelled protest movement that grew out of anger over repeated examination paper leaks. What followed was not a single ruling but an evolving, sometimes contradictory, sequence of interim orders — a live demonstration of a court trying to referee the space between the right to protest and the machinery of law and order, largely because no one else was willing to.
The specifics matter. On July 28, a bench led by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant, along with Justices Joymalya Bagchi and V. Mohana, restrained states from coercive action against protesters and ordered the release of anyone under eighteen, provided they had no ‘criminal antecedents.’ That phrase turned out to be dangerously elastic — vague enough that police in several states reportedly used it to keep minor cases alive against ordinary student demonstrators. On August 3, the same bench had to walk the language back, clarifying that ‘criminal antecedents’ meant only grave and heinous offences, and that Delhi and other states were free to close or withdraw FIRs against the rest. Even that clarification came with a catch: the Solicitor General noted that withdrawing an FIR is not a unilateral executive act, but one requiring a public prosecutor’s request and a court’s approval under criminal procedure law. The right sentiment, in other words, still has to move through the machinery — slowly.
Running parallel to the FIR question is a second, arguably more serious one: whether the police response itself crossed a line. Petitions brought by a former IPS officer and two injured protesters allege that the Rapid Action Force fired pump-action pellet guns into the July 20 crowd, sending metal projectiles into demonstrators who were later treated at Lady Hardinge Medical College. The Court’s posture here has been notably cautious. It declined an outright ban, noting that existing Bureau of Police Research and Development guidelines permit pellet guns in exceptional circumstances, and instead directed Delhi Police to produce its standard operating procedures. By August 3, the bench indicated it would go further and draft a nationwide protocol on when and how pellet guns can be used at all — an acknowledgment that no such clear framework currently exists, three years after similar controversies over their use in Kashmir.
The Court has also floated the idea of a Special Investigation Team, potentially led by a former Supreme Court judge, to independently establish what actually happened on July 20 — including the contested question of whether attacks on police personnel were carried out by genuine protesters or, as officials have suggested, by ‘miscreants’ who infiltrated the march. That framing deserves scrutiny in its own right: it is also a familiar device governments reach for to distinguish ‘legitimate’ dissent from disorder, and legitimacy, applied after the fact, is a moving target.
Taken together, these interventions reveal something more interesting than any single order: a judiciary stepping into a vacuum that the executive and the legislature left open. There was no pre-existing national protocol on pellet guns. There was no clear, publicly known standard for when a minor’s arrest during a protest counts as having ‘criminal antecedents.’ There was no established mechanism for a state to walk back an FIR filed in the heat of a crackdown. The Court is now writing all of this from the bench, in response to specific harms already inflicted, rather than reviewing a framework that existed beforehand. That is not how these safeguards are supposed to arrive.
None of this should be mistaken for a story about the Court going soft on disorder, nor about it being uniformly protective of protesters — its own record this cycle includes upholding the state’s authority to use pellet guns in extraordinary circumstances and declining an immediate ban. What the case actually shows is a system correcting itself awkwardly, in public, under pressure, because the routine safeguards that should have existed before a mass youth protest ever reached the streets simply did not. The August 18 hearing, where the Court is expected to take up the SIT’s composition and the Centre’s affidavits on FIRs and pellet-gun use, is not a footnote to the Cockroach protests. It is the part of the story where the country finds out whether accountability for policing dissent will be built into the system, or whether it will keep arriving only after the bleeding has already happened.
DA Editorial ( Dhruba Deka )