6 min readJul 27, 2026 07:19 AM IST First published on: Jul 27, 2026 at 06:20 AM ISTAt the best of times, policing protests in democratic societies is a tricky business. No amount of training, equipment and manpower can adequately prepare a police force to take on a crowd of young student protestors who are fired by the recklessness and certainty of youthful idealism. The recently concluded protests at Jantar Mantar organised by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) hold many lessons for all serving police personnel. The scenes from Central Delhi over the past week — tear gas drifting over Jantar Mantar, baton charges near Parliament, hundreds injured on both sides of the barricade — will be studied in police training academies for years. Whatever one’s view of the CJP’s politics, the operational lessons for law enforcement are worth extracting carefully, because crowd management failures of this scale rarely have a single cause. They are usually the product of several smaller misjudgements compounding under pressure.Before I get to the professional lessons, let me first compliment my colleagues in Delhi police: Given the scale of the crowd and the passions on display, it is remarkable that no lives, either of our young citizens or of our uniformed personnel, were lost. Clearly, the principle of bare minimum force was admirably adhered to.AdvertisementThe manner in which these protests were conducted and concluded are also a testimony to the health and strength of democracy in India. However I would like to offer a word of advice to Gen Z protestors. Can we have less profanity to express your anger at the establishment please? The reels hurling abuse at the Prime Minister, a 76 year-old senior citizen, certainly marked a new low in our democratic discourse. The right to protest is not diminished when expressed in polite and temperate language.Moving on to matters of professional policing, the CJP movement did not arrive as a conventional political rally with a known command structure. It began as satire, spread through memes and student networks, and only later crystallised into an organised force with spokespeople. Police intelligence built for tracking established parties and unions is often poorly suited to a movement that is decentralised in its early phase and only partially so by the time it reaches the streets. The first lesson is structural: Intelligence gathering has to track sentiment and online mobilisation, not just organisational rosters. By the time 10,000-plus people converged on a march to Parliament, the department needed to already understand who could actually speak for the crowd, and, just as important, who could not.It is clear that in today’s scenario, social-media monitoring in real time is an imperative for effective policing. All police forces across the country need to invest in setting up state-of-the-art social-media monitoring centres as a part of their intelligence wings as well as their operational command and control centres. Timely analysis of social-media activity can provide early warning of the buildup of large demonstrations, and provide valuable time to prepare for and prevent any violent confrontation.AdvertisementJantar Mantar exists precisely because the authorities long ago decided that allowing a fixed, monitored space for large protests is safer than permitting open-ended marching. But a designated site only works if protestors believe the grievance is being heard there. When a march is explicitly aimed at Parliament rather than Jantar Mantar, that is itself a signal — one that calls for early, visible political engagement, not just a bigger barricade. Physical containment without any accompanying political or administrative outreach tends to convert frustration into confrontation. Engagement has to happen before the crowd is already moving, not after tear gas has been fired.Reports of nearly 180 injuries, between security personnel and protestors, point to a genuinely chaotic confrontation rather than a one-sided crackdown. But in the era of ubiquitous phone cameras, the video that circulates afterward matters almost as much as the tactical outcome on the ground. Footage of young protestors being struck or dragged does lasting damage to institutional legitimacy regardless of what provoked the initial clash. Modern crowd-control doctrine increasingly treats the “camera-eye view” as an operational variable: Units need clear rules of engagement, visible identification, and, where feasible, the discipline to de-escalate. A force that wins the street but loses the social-media narrative has not fully succeeded.The hospitalisation of hunger-striking activist, Sonam Wangchuk, appears to have been a turning point that swelled the march well beyond initial estimates. High-profile fasts sit at an uncomfortable intersection of medical duty and political optics; heavy-handed or poorly explained intervention almost always backfires. Police and administrators handling such situations need a pre-agreed protocol — ideally involving independent medical opinion and transparent communication — rather than an improvised decision made under time pressure.It is notable that a genuine breakthrough — ministers meeting spokespeople, talk of a resolution — only came after the worst of the clashes. Waiting for a crisis to force negotiation is a costly sequencing error. Where a movement has emerged with identifiable spokespeople, opening a channel early is cheaper, in injuries and legitimacy. This is a coordination challenge as much as a policing one — it requires political leadership to move at the same speed as the street — but it is a lesson the police, as the ones absorbing the immediate physical and reputational cost of delay, have every incentive to push for.you may likeMass detentions followed by legal action against dozens of protestors send a message, but so does the pace and proportionality with which those cases are handled afterward. A movement built substantially by young, first-time protestors will judge the state as much by what happens after the cameras leave as by what happened at the barricade. Case backlogs or perceived selective prosecution become grievances of their own, feeding the next cycle.None of this erases the genuine difficulty of policing a fast-moving, socially-mediated protest movement with unclear leadership and enormous crowd sizes. But the throughline across most large-scale crowd-control failures — in India and elsewhere — is the same: Intelligence built for the wrong kind of movement, engagement offered too late, and force calibrated for the confrontation rather than for what happens when the footage goes online. Those are fixable problems, and they are the ones worth fixing before the next confrontation at Jantar Mantar.The author is a serving IPS officer. Views are personal