A day inside Delhi’s student protest

Not the slogans. Not the drone shots. Not the viral reels of students running through barricades. What Instagram clips cannot capture is the burning sensation of tear gas settling in your throat, your eyes watering uncontrollably, and the lingering haze hanging over Central Delhi hours after the first shells were fired.

Standing near Jantar Mantar, Tolstoy Road, Connaught Place and Palika Bazar, the protest felt less like a political event and more like a city under extraordinary strain. By late afternoon, every intersection carried the same rhythm: protesters regrouping, police formations tightening, sirens echoing and another burst of tear gas rolling across the streets.

The march towards Parliament had begun around 9-10 am. Yet even between 5:30 pm and 6 pm, tear gas continued to be fired around the Connaught Place-Jantar Mantar stretch. The two blocks surrounding Jantar Mantar remained engulfed in smoke as Rapid Action Force (RAF) personnel, Delhi Police and CISF jawans tried to contain protesters attempting to move through multiple routes.

Metro stations across the area transformed into security zones. Rajiv Chowk, Janpath, Central Secretariat, Mandi House and adjoining stations saw heavy deployment of Delhi Police, RAF personnel and CISF jawans. Entrances were cordoned off. Access was controlled. Commuters were stopped, questioned and redirected. What is usually Delhi’s busiest transit network had become an extension of the protest ground.

Perhaps the most striking metaphor of the day came not from a political speech but from a fellow protester standing near Palika Bazar.

“Cockroach ki tarah bhaag rahe hain,” he said while watching protesters scatter as police advanced.

The comparison stayed with me.

Anyone who has tried to kill a cockroach in a kitchen knows the sequence. The moment danger approaches, it disappears into the nearest crack, sink or drain. You think it is gone. The instant the threat recedes, it reappears from another corner.

That was exactly how the protest unfolded across Central Delhi.

As RAF teams charged or police pushed demonstrators back, groups of students disappeared into subway passages and Metro stations. Rajiv Chowk, Janpath, Central Secretariat and Mandi House were no longer merely transport hubs. They became temporary hideouts, regrouping points and escape routes. Minutes later, the same protesters would emerge from another exit, rejoin the march and continue towards Parliament.

Whether one agreed with the comparison or not, it became an apt analogy for the fluid nature of the protest itself. Every dispersal was temporary. Every retreat was followed by another appearance elsewhere.

Ironically, the word “cockroach” had already become central to the political vocabulary surrounding the protests. What began as an online political label eventually spilled onto the streets, where protesters themselves began using the metaphor to describe their own movement through the city’s underground network.

The city, for a few hours, behaved like a maze.

More than one movement

Reducing the demonstration to a single political ideology would be simplistic.

Conversations on the ground revealed that people had arrived for different reasons.

Some spoke about the alleged NEET paper leak. Others had been mobilised through the CJP online campaign. Many had come in support of Abhijeet Dipke and Sonam Wangchuk’s protest at Jantar Mantar. Students from different campuses mixed with first-time protesters, political volunteers and ordinary citizens who had simply decided that the day warranted their presence.

It did not feel like a conventional party rally where everyone repeated identical talking points.

Instead, it resembled multiple streams of public anger converging into one march.

The scale that surprised Delhi

The most remarkable aspect of the day was not merely the number of people but the conviction with which they occupied the streets.

Watching thousands of students walk towards Parliament raised an obvious question. Had the crowd collectively decided to overpower security forces, containing it would have become extraordinarily difficult.

Fortunately, that did not happen. Instead, the confrontation largely remained one of barricades, tear gas, baton charges and repeated attempts to disperse crowds. Yet the determination of many protesters was unmistakable. Young students stood before rows of riot police knowing fully that they were likely to face lathis or tear gas.

It is difficult to explain that motivation through statistics alone. Standing there, one inevitably wondered what compelled so many young people to willingly endure physical pain for a cause they believed deserved national attention.

Dozens of students and protesters sustained injuries during the day. Policemen and security personnel were also hurt. Such outcomes, unfortunately, often accompany confrontational protests of this scale.

The city pays the price

The disruption quickly became another point of debate.

Roads were blocked. Metro access was restricted. Office workers were delayed. Daily commuters found themselves trapped inside diversions and security cordons.

Critics argued that ordinary citizens should not have to bear the burden of political demonstrations.

Yet there is another argument. Large protests are designed precisely to interrupt normalcy. If a demonstration leaves everyday life untouched, it rarely commands sustained public attention. A protest seeking national visibility inevitably spills beyond designated protest sites such as Jantar Mantar and enters the daily routines of the city it wishes to influence.

Whether one considers that democratic expression or unacceptable inconvenience depends largely on one’s politics.

Questions that remain

Even as the smoke cleared, the questions multiplied.

Was the protest backed by Left organisations? Was there any foreign funding, as some alleged? Why were few senior CJP leaders visible at the protest site apart from Abhijeet Dipke? Why did the march follow the route it did instead of a shorter path towards Parliament?

None of these questions had clear answers on the ground.

What remained undeniable, however, was that New Delhi had witnessed one of its largest and most unexpected political mobilisations in recent years. The emergence of figures such as Ashutosh Ranka, Saurabh Das and Abhijeet Dipke has become a political story in itself, while controversies such as the “Vijeta Dahi burger” episode continue to shape online narratives around the movement.

Crowd estimates varied sharply. Dipke and several participants claimed attendance of 30,000 to 40,000. Others believed the cumulative turnout across Central Delhi, including the moving procession, may have crossed one lakh. The exact number remains contested, but few who stood on those streets would dispute the scale of the mobilisation.

Orwell and the streets

Watching the protest unfold also recalled George Orwell’s enduring observation on liberty: “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Orwell argued that freedom of expression depends not merely on constitutional guarantees but on a society willing to tolerate uncomfortable opinions. In Freedom of the Park, he noted how open public spaces allow dissent to become visible. At the same time, Nineteen Eighty-Four warned how demonstrations themselves can be manipulated by those in power, reminding readers that even mass mobilisation demands scepticism and independent thought.

The events around Jantar Mantar existed somewhere between those two Orwells.

There was genuine dissent. There was disruption. There was state force. There was political messaging. There was competing propaganda online. And there was an undeniable reminder that democracies, unlike dictatorships, often reveal themselves most clearly not during elections but during protests.

Long after the tear gas had dispersed and the Metro stations returned to normal, what remained was not merely another day of demonstrations.

It was the memory of a city where thousands disappeared underground like cockroaches, only to emerge again, carrying the same slogans, the same anger and the same belief that they still had something worth saying.

END OF ARTICLE