All the FIRs … are hereby quashed.” With that order by a three-judge bench, led by Chief justice of India Surya Kant, a welcome moment of closure was reached on Tuesday. The story began with the students’ protests at Jantar Mantar against the NEET paper leak. It saw a brutish crackdown by the police on the march by mostly young protesters demanding a hearing from the people’s representatives in Parliament. These columns have strongly and consistently argued for the freedom to protest peacefully, which is part of the constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech and expression, and against its criminalisation by the government. And yet, rewind to Tuesday’s quashing of FIRs by the Court, acting on the request of governments at the Centre and some states, and a question continues to hang in the courtroom: If Tuesday’s quashing is an admission that a punishing state unfairly targeted citizens for exercising their democratic right to protest, isn’t the manner of the quashing problematic — because it seems selective? The cases being closed is the right thing to do, but are they being closed for the right reason? Does the government find it expedient to close them against one set of protesters while letting those against other protesters linger on, making the process their punishment? The question is, basically, this: What about the protesters left out of Tuesday’s frame?
Because the story of the April protests by factory workers in Noida demanding higher wages has played out very differently. There, as this paper has reported, a police crackdown saw up to 200 people taken into custody, including two under the stringent NSA. The court stepped in to grant relief in 84 per cent of the cases — on Wednesday, the Allahabad High Court quashed the NSA detention of a student activist, terming the state’s case “concocted”. But they fell one by one, for reasons ranging from lack of specific evidence to treating a crowd as the accused. There was no blanket relief — the average period a protester spent in custody was 53 days. Cases related to the 2019-2020 protests against a discriminatory citizenship law unleashed prolonged legal battles across various courts. In UP, the government continued to harass the accused, naming and shaming them in public hoardings, attaching properties by undue process, ignoring the court’s rebuke that it had become both complainant and adjudicator. Cases from the farmers’ protests of 2021 are still pending. As are those slapped against individuals across the country, for the “crime” of disagreeing with the powers that be.
Tuesday’s quashing of FIRs against students will be a valuable moment if it expands the area of freedom for all — if it means that henceforth, the government will be more tolerant of free speech and the Court will give the benefit of the doubt to the vulnerable individual, not the government. It will be unfortunate if it only means that the decision to file an FIR and the decision to quash a protest depends on whether the protester is seen as “us” or “them”.
