(The Quint's reporters go through great risks to bring you in-depth reports and investigations. Support our work by becoming a member.)On 10 October, when the national capital saw an unprecedented lockdown of central Delhi in anticipation of student-led protests against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and CEC Gyanesh Kumar, I, a video journalist, decided to go on the ground to document the day.With almost 50 metro stations closed, railway stations shut, roads barricaded, cab service apps down, more than 35,000 police and army personnel deployed, and a blanket internet shutdown, it was a day that demanded journalists get out of their office spaces and be on the ground documenting the events.I left home with a friend, who is also a journalist, Anureet Watta from QueerBeat, and headed towards Connaught Place at 9:00 am. As we approached central Delhi, the routes to which were heavily fortified, we were stopped by Delhi Police personnel near Ashoka Police Lane, at the intersection of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk Road and Panchsheel Road.We decided to leave the auto there and walk towards CP, since both of us were carrying press ID cards issued by our respective organisations. Multiple police personnel accosted us, stopped us from passing through the barricade, and directed us to their senior officer at the location. The senior officer asked us to show cards issued by the Press Information Bureau (PIB).The female officer asked us many questions that left us perplexed as journalists. “Why do you want to go inside where there is nothing happening... there are no protests,” she said.I already had colleagues at CP who had started reporting on detentions that had taken place from early morning, so this was a factually incorrect statement. After seeing our cards, she acknowledged that she had heard of The Quint, but not QueerBeat. She said that if you did not have PIB cards, you could not go inside, citing the fear of “a lot of random people calling themselves journalists... fake journalists”.After much back and forth, we reminded the officer about the advisory that Delhi Police themselves had issued, which allowed people carrying press cards issued by their organisation to use them as valid ID cards. The Quint also confirmed this same fact through another officer on record that day.This is a reminder that PIB cards are state-sanctioned cards and are not a test of whether someone is a ‘real’ or ‘fake’ journalist. There is no statutory definition of a journalist in the Indian legal system; hence, even the mere act of asking for any sort of ID card to prove that you are a journalist is legally dubious.Detained Inside Chanakyapuri Police StationQueerBeat Journalist Anureet also detained'Ye Quint Kya Hai?': Quint Reporters Detained, Harassed At Anti-Gyanesh ProtestDetention In the Name of ‘Verification’The officer instructed her subordinates to escort us to Chanakyapuri Police Station for a ‘verification’. The two of us were put on a bus and taken to the police station. When asked what this process of verification entailed, the Investigating Officer (IO) there said that they required our names, phone numbers, fathers’ names, Aadhaar cards and current residential addresses.I wondered how any of these details would help them verify the fact that I am a ‘real’ journalist. We refused to provide our personal details and asked them to take the information from our own ID cards or call our employers, which had our names, employee codes and the address of the organisation. When we asked them to look up our organisations online, they said there was no internet, a situation of the government's own making.An hour into our presence at the police station, we started receiving the silent treatment. They refused to answer any questions unless we gave them all the details they had asked for. The IO was rarely around and would return every hour or so to ask for our details. As their attitude shifted by the second hour, we started asking them to clarify whether we had been detained. But the silent treatment continued. We were already in touch with our respective organisations, and they were arranging for lawyers and the support required to get us out.I asked a cop near me to let us go. She replied, “We are doing our job only, sir.” I retorted, “What about my job? Why am I being barred from doing my job?” She had no answer.While the police maintained a cordial yet silent demeanour towards us because we were from the press, they would constantly berate other detainees who had allegedly come for the protests. The police would lecture them on how they should be doing better with their lives, how they had been brainwashed and misguided, how these protests led to nothing, and how they should be “more like the police”.An important distinction to draw is that these questions were never directed at us. The gaze towards us was not one of disgust, as it was towards those people who had been detained. Even though their actions were not overtly violent, there was a visibly simmering disdain within the police towards ‘protestors’.None of this is the police’s job. They are no one to tell people who might have come to protest, to witness the protests, or for any other reason, that they have been brainwashed. Protesting is not a crime. Their job is not to pressure and intimidate people into becoming servile followers. That might be a requirement to be in the police, but not to be a citizen.About four and a half hours in, the police had fed all the detainees some food and offered some water. By the time, lawyers and some other journalists who had heard about detainees at the police station, had started showing up. After a lot of persuasion and negotiations, the police let us go. We still had to give our Aadhaar card details. One of the lawyers who had come to help us told me that he himself came out of detention right now.“The police have started to detain lawyers” he said, as if reporting the weather. We were told that the other detainees would be released in a few hours. Journalists and lawyers outside Chanakyapuri Police Station'Detained Despite Showing Press ID': Police Crackdown on Media Amid CJP ProtestThe State of Journalists in Delhi TodayThose few hours of detention, on a day that saw the unprecedented lockdown of a city, allowed time to gain some perspective. When we were finally outside the police station, walking through streets filled with police vans, journalist friends recounted their encounters with the police, some of them much more brutal and violent, and even longer than ours.One of them remarked, “You’ve popped your protest journalism cherry. This is part and parcel of the job.” That remark was unsettling, yet revealing. Journalists in India, for a long time now, have been at the receiving end of the most vicious and invisibilised kind of state violence.Why is this part and parcel of the job? Why is violence against journalists so commonplace that the community itself has had to make peace with it to such an extent? That getting detained is your inculcation ceremony, having your page taken down is a badge of honour, and having an IT raid on your organisation is a test of how free your journalism is.On 10 and 11 October, the Delhi and Mumbai police detained and brutalised journalists en masse. Despite the orders from the Supreme Court and the UN Human Rights Office (OHCHR) voicing concern over arbitrary detentions, they were deciding who gets to document the day and who gets silenced, all to preserve a monopoly on truth that is rapidly slipping through their fingers.A detention bus stationedTo understand why journalists with nothing more than a phone and a wireless mic now feel like an existential threat to the national capital’s security apparatus, you have to look at what has been happening on the ground since the student protests over paper leaks at Jantar Mantar.Before the events of 20 July unfolded, the state thought that it had the narrative thoroughly controlled and was the sole authority over ‘truth creation’. But that authority has slowly begun to corrode over the past few years, with the advent of social media and the ground being held by independent digital newsrooms and regional news organisations. Following the brutality inflicted on students in the heart of the national capital, the use of pellet guns on innocent protestors, and the utter fumbling of the state machinery as it tried to PR-control the massacre it had unleashed on its own citizens, its loss of narrative control has been cemented.If a decentralised journalist documents the police using something resembling a pellet gun on a particular protester, independent media does its job by going through hospital records and medical records and speaking to the person affected to confirm the use of pellet guns.This symbiotic relationship is the perfect counter to capital-pilled mainstream media, which, until now, has used its wealth, its enormity and its proximity to power to retain control over the narrative, truth creation and the manufacturing of consent.'Cops Lifted My Shirt': A Woman Journalist's Horrors At Delhi ProtestsA Classist Rhetoric and a Casteist Panic to Gatekeep MediaTaking a step back to understand what is essentially happening here, a police officer is given the authority to decide who is a ‘proper journalist’ and to restrict their movement into a space where the state has made all the arrangements to crack down on dissent in the national capital of India.When I asked how this verification would be done, the police responded by saying that they have officers who ‘know’ which organisations are legitimate and which are not. Essentially, this means telling you who they want inside this space and who they do not, so that the information that comes out of this space is mediated through the entry of those found legitimate by the state.This is not just my story. Countless journalists have either been picked up and detained by the police for carrying press IDs, heckled or abused by cops, or had their movement restricted based on arbitrary logic. The Quint has had four of its other journalists, Eshwar, Shiv Kumar Maurya, Uzair Usmani, and Anay Samarth, almost detained, questioned and heckled by the police.Although there is still some semblance of protection that the tag of journalist provides, the space to become one is being shrunk. You also see the intention of the state to categorise legitimacy along class and caste lines. The bureaucratic frameworks to define a journalist are an attempt at centralising information flow once again.But if journalists are to learn one thing from the people who assert their rights with utmost ferocity while being clamped down upon with much more brutality, it is that cockroaches are persistent.'See My Press Card': Reporters Detained, Manhandled At Jantar Mantar Protest