There has been a spate of lynchings in Haryana in recent months. Armed mobs have murdered people on suspicion that they have been involved in cattle smuggling. It is well known that various organisations responsible for these attacks have the support and encouragement of those in power. To voice the concern and opposition of our people to such gruesome acts, six political parties —the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the Communist Party of India, the Communist Party of India (Marxist Leninist), the Communist Ghadar Party of India, the All India Forward Bloc and the Revolutionary Socialist Party of India — planned to hold a protest march in New Delhi on 7 September, from Doordarshan building to Haryana Bhavan, a few hundred meters away. The Delhi Police, which is under the command of the Central Government, picked up the protestors, even as they assembled at Doordarshan Building, pushed them into police buses, and drove them off to the far corners of the city, releasing them only in the evening.
Just two days earlier, on 5 September on the occasion of Teachers’ Day, teachers’ organisations in the capital planned a protest march from Mandi House to Jantar Mantar in New Delhi. They wanted to express their opposition to the privatisation of education. They wanted to highlight that the state was not fulfilling its duty of ensuring uniform, good quality education for all. The protesting teachers were forcibly carried away in police buses and prevented from carrying out the march.
All protests calling for an end to Israel’s genocidal war against the Palestinian people have been criminalized. Not one single protest on this issue has been permitted.
Women’s organisations in Delhi planned a joint rally to mark International Women’s Day on 8 March 2024. The women were brutally attacked, even as they assembled for the program, and taken away to the police station.
The BJP government at the Center must be condemned for its blatant violation of the right of people to assemble peacefully and protest against injustice. The situation is so bad that it does not allow people and their organisations to organise meetings on various issues, even in closed meeting halls. Such was the case when various organisations tried to organise a meeting on 6 December 2023, to mark the anniversary of the demolition of the Babri Masjid. The central government has threatened the management of private halls and auditoriums with dire consequences if they allow such a meeting. In the same way, the management of public halls and auditoriums have been warned by the state to not allow meetings which discuss the plight of innocent youth incarcerated in jails for more than the past four years, on false charges of organizing communal riots in North East Delhi in 2020 and conspiring to overthrow the government of India.
The problem is not only with the BJP governments at the centre and in the states. In all the states and union territories of the country, irrespective of which party is in charge, the government is using police powers to deprive people of the right to protest against exploitation and injustice. The problem has its roots in the very nature of the state and its constitution.
Article 19 of the Constitution of India begins by declaring:
(1) All citizens shall have the right—
(a) to freedom of speech and expression;
(b) to assemble peaceably and without arms;
Reading the above, it would seem that the people of India enjoy the democratic right to assemble peacefully and protest against injustice.
Nothing can be further from reality. The very same Article 19 of the Constitution of India negates both these rights in the name of giving the state the power to impose “reasonable restrictions” on the exercise of these rights.
The right to freedom of speech and expression can be denied in the name of upholding the sovereignty and integrity of India, the security of the State, friendly relations with foreign States, public order, decency or morality, or in relation to contempt of court, defamation or incitement to an offence.
Similarly the right to assemble peacefully without arms can be denied in the name of upholding the sovereignty and integrity of India or public order.
By what stretch of imagination can a peaceful protest march to oppose lynching be considered to be against the sovereignty and integrity of India or against public order?
The reality is that the Constitution of India does not guarantee the right to freedom of speech and expression, or the right to freedom of peaceful assembly. It permits the state to deprive any section of the people of these rights under various pretexts. Article 19 of the Constitution of India gives the state the power to use existing laws, or make new laws, to deny the workers, peasants, women, youth and other sections of the working people of these rights.
One of the existing laws that is most often used to smash protests of working people is Section 144 in the CrPC (Criminal Procedure Code) 1973. This law allows the state to ban the assembly of five or more people in an area.
Section 144 of the CrPC was part of the British colonial CrPC enacted in 1882. The CrPC was aimed at crushing rebellion against colonial rule. It was used to quell dissent and any form of political opposition. This intention was evident in the code’s provisions for preventive arrests and prohibiting public gatherings. The Indian state retained this provision in CrPC 1973. Fifty years later, the BJP government has been trumpeting that it has gotten rid of colonial laws by replacing the CrPC with the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Samhita (BNSS). However the truth is the opposite. The colonial era Section 144 has been retained in the BNSS, only the number has changed — it has become Section 148. Its aim is to crush all opposition from the working class and people of our country to the existing system and state.
The Indian Republic and the Constitution of India adopted in 1950 are a continuation of the colonial state, built on the foundation of brutal repression, and communal and caste-based division of the population. Every right promised in the Chapter on Fundamental Rights in the Constitution is negated in the very next clause. This ensures that democratic rights will remain a mere illusion for the workers, peasants, women, youth and masses of working people.
Every political party that has taken charge of the executive, on behalf of the ruling bourgeoisie, over the past 77 years has used police powers to attack the people’s right to protest against injustice and state terror. This is true of not only the BJP, but of the Congress Party and other political parties of the bourgeoisie as well.
The existing system, which is touted as the ‘world’s most populous democracy’, is in reality the brutal dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The ruling bourgeoisie has given itself the power to attack the human and democratic rights of the people, to smash the unity and solidarity of the people of our country. It has ferociously attacked the rights of workers and peasants, and unleashed communal and sectarian violence time and again. At the same time, it has continuously deprived our people of the right to fight for changing their conditions.
The working class and oppressed people have to wage their struggle for justice and rights with the perspective of establishing a new state which will be an instrument of workers’ and peasants’ rule, in place of the present state which is an instrument of the rule of the bourgeoisie.