Could This Be the End of Delhi’s Most Iconic Protest Site?
Ask Rachna Dhingra what protest is for, and she doesn’t talk about slogans — she talks about family. For five months in 2008, she camped with survivors of the 1984 Bhopal gas leak on a narrow, tree-shaded road beside Jantar Mantar, Delhi’s 18th-century observatory turned protest ground, pressing the government for a rehabilitation commission. “It can be lonely to protest but that place became a home for so many of us. We shared each other’s stories, struggles and victories,” she says. That history, built up over more than three decades, may now be ending.
Delhi Police confirmed this week that the site will lose its status as a designated protest venue, capping a tumultuous year. The Gen Z collective Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) — which began half as a joke — drew tens of thousands there demanding the resignation of federal education minister Dharmendra Pradhan, who duly stepped down. Barricades went up soon after, and a renewed CJP march last week, seeking the election chief’s resignation, ended in a police crackdown.
Three replacement venues have been named, but none offer what Jantar Mantar did: two sit far from the corridors of power, and the third, Ramlila Ground, is typically booked months ahead. Unlike the free site demonstrators have used for decades, all three charge daily fees. Police cite a Supreme Court suggestion to find better-equipped locations, but opponents say the real effect will be pricing out ordinary citizens and pushing dissent further from government. The BBC found paramilitary units guarding yellow barricades at both ends of the road this week; a nearby shopkeeper declined to discuss what was happening.
Built in the 1720s by Maharaja Sawai Jai Singh II, Jantar Mantar spent most of its life as a tourist curiosity, not a rallying point, until 1993, when the governing Congress party banned demonstrations from the Boat Club lawns facing the old parliament. Historian Harleen Kaur has charted how administrations since the 1960s kept nudging protest sites further from lawmakers; as she put it in a 2023 paper, the site’s location “3km (1.86 miles) from the Parliament House, [allowed the government] to contain protesting crowds at some distance from the Parliament House and PM’s residence.”
For activists, the distance never stopped the work. Dipa Sinha, an academic tied to the Right to Food campaign, watched a rural jobs scheme, the food safety law and the Forest Rights Act take shape through debates held there — “a place where you could discuss issues with people who came to Delhi from across the country,” she says. Protesters would picket nearby government offices, get detained, and head back to regroup. Comfort was never part of the deal: Dhingra remembers sheltering under tarpaulin in the rain and relying on public toilets and gurdwaras to wash.
The site’s legal status has swung back and forth: shut to protests in 2017 by the National Green Tribunal over poor infrastructure, then reopened a year later by the Supreme Court on free-speech grounds. Even so, rules kept tightening — Dhingra says recent attempts to camp overnight have simply been refused. Newcomers to Delhi were often struck by the site’s proximity to power: “That’s the president’s house? Does the prime minister live there? How can they not listen to us when we are at their gates?” Sinha notes the nearby Press Club made it an easy draw for journalists and politicians alike.
Some remember an even freer era before 1993. Gender studies scholar Mary E John, who protested at the Boat Club on issues from labour rights to global affairs, recalls: “We lived in a climate where protest was part of life. In fact, we took it for granted.” The move to the smaller Jantar Mantar site felt “claustrophobic” by comparison, she says — a word that may fit again as dissent is pushed further from where decisions get made.
Source: BBC News