बेबाक · Editorial
From Jamia to Keonjhar, India's Grievances Need Answers Before They Need Policing
Protests are spreading across campuses, villages and capitals as oil-driven price pressures build. The state should open channels for dissent, not merely manage it.
A season of grievance
This week, dissent has surfaced in very different places. At Jamia Millia Islamia, a continuing student protest has pushed classes online. In Keonjhar, farmers blocked a road. In the capital, the Union Home Minister visited Delhi Police headquarters to take stock of law and order while the force faces scrutiny over its handling of a July protest. The causes differ: campus representation, irrigation water, public order. The question they share is the same. When citizens feel unheard, do the institutions meant to listen to them respond, or do they only contain them? The answer will matter more in the months ahead, because the economic weather is turning.
The campus question
The Jamia students want the Jamia Millia Islamia Students' Union (JMISU) restored. It was disbanded in 2006, which means two decades of students have passed through the university with no elected body of their own. The administration's position deserves a fair statement. Universities fear that factional politics will disrupt teaching, and campus elections in many places have brought muscle and money with them. The students' position is also strong. When there is no elected body, grievances have no recognised channel, so they leave the meeting room and arrive at the gate. The registrar and opposition members of Parliament are now trading allegations, and that is the worst possible arena for resolving this. Shifting classes online settles nothing. It only postpones the reckoning and makes students pay for it in lost teaching.
Order and its limits
It is legitimate for the Union Home Minister to review policing in the national capital. Delhi hosts Parliament, the courts, the embassies and many of the country's largest protests. Keeping order there is a real duty, and the force that carries it deserves support. The visit, however, came while the force's handling of a July protest remains under scrutiny. If the stock-taking produces only tighter deployment plans, it will have missed its purpose. Public confidence in a police force rests on more than its ability to clear a road. It also rests on whether the force can show, with evidence, that it treated peaceful assembly as a right to be facilitated rather than a threat to be dispersed. A review that ends without a public account of what happened in July will not settle the matter.
The pressure building
The economy gives these frictions more weight. The rupee slipped 12 paise to 94.93 against the dollar, its second straight day of decline, with Brent crude hovering above $114 a barrel amid tensions in the Middle East. The Sensex and Nifty closed lower on October 22 for a third consecutive session, as rising oil prices heightened concerns over the inflation outlook. Dearer fuel eventually reaches the farm, the bus fare and the kitchen. The Keonjhar blockade in Banchho village of Hatadihi block was not ideological. Farmers wanted irrigation water for their fields. Elsewhere, farmers blocked the Mysuru-Bengaluru highway at the Gananguru toll plaza in Mandya district for two hours, and in Punjab, government employees and pensioners, under the banner of the Punjab Employees and Pensioners Joint Front and the Joint Employees Platform Punjab, struck work over pending dearness allowance and pension revision. These are grievances about livelihood, and rising prices could multiply them.
What should be done
Three steps are feasible now. First, Jamia Millia Islamia should publish a time-bound consultation on restoring an elected student body, with a clear code against disruption and outside interference, and resume physical classes while that process runs. Second, Delhi Police should place a full account of its handling of the July protest in the public domain, setting out what went right, what went wrong and what will change. Third, district administrations in farming regions such as Keonjhar should announce irrigation release schedules in advance and hold grievance hearings before the sowing season, not after a road is blocked. None of this weakens the state. A government that listens early spends far less on policing late, and a republic earns respect when its citizens have somewhere to be heard.
A republic is judged not by whether its citizens protest, but by whether they have somewhere to be heard before they reach the street.
What this editorial rests on
Drawn from our live multi-newsroom feed — read the reporting at source.
An editorial is the considered opinion of the Aad Tak desk, argued from the sourced reporting above and written under our published persona, बेबाक. We name institutions, not parties. If we are wrong, we will say so. How we work →