Bodies at the barricade: notes from Jantar Mantar student protest

On July 20, thousands of students converged on Jantar Mantar for CJP’s “Chalo Sansad” march, demanding accountability from a Government that has spent years disclaiming responsibility for the state of the education system it presides over. What had begun as an orderly, almost procedural demonstration transformed by evening curdled into scenes of lathi charges, tear gas fired in sustained volleys, and crowds pressed against barricades with nowhere left to go.

I was there. What follows is my own account, alongside testimonies I gathered from four peers who were present at different points along the march route — Aditi, Vikram, Saira*, and Palak. Read together, their accounts do not converge on a single narrative so much as they triangulate one: a demonstration that was peaceful and self-policing until the state decided otherwise, and a use of force so undifferentiated that it stopped distinguishing between protester and bystander, advance and retreat, dissent and simple presence.

The morning

We arrived early. The mood was determined but not adversarial; if anything, what struck me was how unremarkable it all felt. The police, for most of the morning, were genuinely courteous. There was no indication, yet, of where the day was headed.

By early afternoon, the heat had gotten to me. I started feeling unwell along with a few others, and we withdrew to recover. It was from where I was sitting - drained and trying to steady myself that news reached us of what was happening to the rest of our group: lathi charges, tear gas shells landing in the same stretch we’d occupied less than an hour before.

Aditi, a first-year student, was still in the crowd when the police moved to push it back.

“They were trying to push us back with lathis, but there was no place to go,” she said. “It just ended up hitting us, and we were being squashed against each other. You couldn’t breathe, because the crowd was so thick, and when you turned your face to breathe upward, it was just tear gas and your eyes, face and throat started burning. It was really horrible.”

At one point, Aditi fell. “I thought I might die, because that’s how stampedes happen,” she said. What kept it from becoming one, by her own account, was the crowd’s own restraint — the people around her were careful enough not to step on her, and she was able to get back up.

Vikram was elsewhere in the same crowd, said that even though this issue doesn’t affect him personally, “I can’t turn my back on an issue that affects lakhs of people, and a government that takes no accountability,” he said. He described people bleeding from the head, every route blocked, tear gas on every side, and a question he kept returning to: why force, instead of dialogue?

Nothing in what he described suggested a targeted or discriminating dispersal. It was tear gas released indiscriminately into a packed, contained crowd that was the precise conditions under which a stampede became likely rather than merely possible. People were not being pushed back in any orderly sense. They were being trapped.

Saira left home at 8 a.m. and did not return until 10 that night. By the time things escalated, she said, tear gas was being dropped on both ends of the crowd simultaneously, front and back - collapsing whatever direction people might have retreated toward. People ended up colliding into one another simply trying to find space that no longer existed. In Connaught Place, she said, a tear gas shell was dropped even on people who were already retreating rather than advancing. This detail, if accurate, undercuts any reading of the response as a controlled attempt to disperse an advancing crowd.

She described Reserve Armed Forces personnel charging at bystanders, and said she watched around a dozen of them, in blue uniforms, beating three people at once. When police then charged toward her own group, they ran and tried to get off the street; shopkeepers locked their doors against them. “The employees of KFC were laughing at us and recording videos when we were pleading with them to let us in to get away from the personnel and the tear gas.”

“Lathi charge Is the new normal”

Palak, another protester I spoke to, was among the first people standing behind the barricades on Sansad Marg, and her account traces the same arc as mine: police cordial at first, and then, with little warning, tear gas fired at intervals of two to three minutes until a stampede broke out. Even then, she said, people were doing their best to remain respectful of one another.

She and a friend were both hit by lathis, her friend repeatedly. She noted that police seemed, at moments, to go somewhat easier on women, though this held inconsistently: when a group of women told officers they were already leaving, “they still didn’t stop.”

By her count (reported by Saira* as well), roughly ten rounds of tear gas were fired within eight minutes, some directed at people who were already running away. She saw one man beaten badly enough that his head split open; she and others were administering first aid to him when police moved in again, scattering everyone before they could finish. What has stayed with her most is the indiscriminateness of it; they were hitting people left and right, not caring if they were retreating. “It was a really sorry situation,” she said.

This is not a movement organised around the fall of a government or a wholesale reordering of the political order. It is a movement of students asking for one specific, delimited thing: accountability in education policy. A resignation, and answers. The same prime minister who built an entire national platform “Pariksha Pe Charcha” around directly addressing students on exam stress and their futures has had nothing to say while lakhs of those same students occupy the street over exactly that. He is the same Prime Minister who wants students to tell him their “Mann ki Baat”, and when they actually want to do that, they get tear-gassed. The absence of that conversation now is itself a kind of answer.

The frustration on display at Jantar Mantar was not manufactured for the occasion; it was general, cumulative, and had clearly been building for a long time before it found its outlet on July 20. When a government stays silent on the precise issue around which it once staged a televised event, and when the response to students asking questions is lathi and tear gas rather than a meeting, that silence is not neutral. It is itself a statement about what kind of accountability this government is prepared to offer, and to whom.