It won’t stay there, but, yesterday, potential transportation choices of anti-CEC/SIR protesters, assumed greater importance than the politics of the issue. In the national capital, presumably expecting a big response to calls for assembling at Jantar Mantar today, authorities initiated serious curbs on public transport, and on many trains with Delhi as the destination. Yes, Jantar Mantar sits too close to seats of governance. But what Supreme Court underlined while considering these curbs, is that the principle of “proportionality” should hold.Delhi is a major railway hub. Cancelling trains to its two major train stations, would involve cascading cancellations. Shutting down 45 metro stations would lead to similar disruptive cascades. SC did right to call for “regulation” instead of “prohibition”. Restricting “unruly” movement is one thing, leaving masses of people “without any transport facility” quite another. SC also spoke, not for the first time, of the need for designating an alternative site, with “amenities”, where peaceful protesters can gather in large numbers. Some would argue, there is an iconicity to Jantar Mantar. But, more to the point, there has been an all-round failure to develop a different option – far enough, but not too far from our Parliament.A deeper democratic issue is that, while societies celebrate different protests retrospectively, when a protest happens, almost every one gets criticised for disturbing ordinary life. The challenge, and it is hardly new, is to establish rules that apply consistently, across different protests whose politics different parts of society will dislike. Furthermore, both in India and in much of the world, it is no new thing for a city to host peaceful protesters, without its public transport seizing up. As the capital of the world’s largest democracy, Delhi should have a well-chosen, well-designed, and large enough site for protests.
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own.