Walls repainted, tents cleared: Central Delhi wipes away protest traces

On Sunday morning, the white boundary wall of the Imperial Hotel on Tolstoy Marg was just a wall again. The night before, it had been a canvas of a generation’s anger, covered in spray-painted slogans, memes, invocations of BR Ambedkar, calls for revolution, and the names of thousands of young people who had come from across the country to demand that an education minister resign. He did. And now the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) workers came with paint rollers and erased it all.

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) called off its 36-day protest at Jantar Mantar on Saturday after the Government accepted their key demands, with Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s exit as the central outcome.

By Sunday, the sprawling protest site in the heart of the national Capital, which had echoed with slogans, speeches and fervent activity for more than a month, wore a deserted look as the makeshift tents had disappeared, and the volunteers and supporters had dispersed, leaving behind little trace of the agitation.

The makeshift tents had been removed. A small police presence remained. The lanes around Jantar Mantar, which had been packed with protesters for days, were quiet.

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation (DMRC) announced that all 18-odd metro stations that had been shut during the peak of the protest, citing security reasons, were now open to passengers. “All stations of the Delhi Metro network are open (both entry and exit) for passenger services,” the DMRC posted on X.

Shops and businesses around Connaught Place resumed operations. A salesman at a garment shop in the area described the scale of loss the agitation had brought. “Our sales have gone down by 90 per cent in the past few days. Now, we are witnessing a gradual increase in customer footfall. We are hopeful we will see a good number of customers in the next 24 hours,” he said.

Mobile and internet services, suspended in the area since the clashes of July 20, were restored. Police said entry to the protest site remained restricted even as several barricades were removed.

The New Delhi Municipal Council launched an extensive clean-up operation in and around Jantar Mantar, with officials saying approximately 60 metric tonnes of waste was expected to be cleared from the site and adjoining roads.

More than 500 officers and employees participated in the drive from Saturday night through Sunday, with sanitation workers, heavy vehicles, and mechanised cleaning equipment deployed jointly by the Health and Sanitation, Civil Engineering, and Horticulture Departments.

The Civil Engineering Department deployed around 50 workers and four jetting machines to clean roads and footpaths, remove slogans from public walls, repaint the walls, and repair damaged kerbstones.

The Health and Sanitation Department deployed 75 workers overnight and 35 more from the morning, removing approximately 60 metric tonnes of waste using eight auto-tippers, two heavy trucks, one JCB, and three high-pressure jetting machines. The Horticulture Department restored green belts, central verges, and landscaped areas.

Apart from civic body officials, several protesters had stayed back last night, volunteering to sweep the litter and collect the waste in garbage bags. “Cleaning up the mess that we’ve created is our responsibility,” said Tushar Mehra, 26, who planned on staying until the waste was cleared at the site where he had spent more than 15 days.

The graffiti that covered the walls was not ordinary protest writing. Layers of spray-painted text in bright colours covered the Imperial Hotel wall, tree trunks, gates, and boundary walls across the area. References to media criticism, calls for revolution, anti-fascist anthems, Gandhian slogans, and direct attacks on government functionaries covered the same surfaces, alongside hundreds of handwritten names and social media handles left by protesters who wanted to record that they had been there.

By Sunday afternoon, the paint rollers had reached most of it. The protest lasted 36 days. The clean-up took one.