The Nine-hour Walk: Dissent Criminalised

A morning walk in Delhi’s Nehru Park turned into a nine-hour ordeal for former civil servant Ashish Joshi who was picked up by Delhi Police’s Special Cell, with his family kept in the dark for most of the time. The episode is not an aberration. It fits the larger pattern of how the Narendra Modi government confronts dissent.

An FIR had earlier been filed against Mr Joshi on August 26 for a social media post calling for a “Nuremberg-style trial” of chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. This could be considered inflammatory rhetoric, but should have been protected under the right to political speech about a public official whose conduct is being questioned by many citizens. Mr Joshi’s post was neither a security threat nor an incitement to violence, yet this post became the basis of his detention.

Picking up and holding a retired civil servant with no flight risk and no history of violence for nearly nine hours without formal arrest and without informing his family is coercion. Such treatment is disproportionate to a mere speech offence.

Surprisingly however, the nine-hour interrogation according to Mr Joshi, was about a different post altogether; one concerning an alleged showdown between Union Home minister Amit Shah and Home secretary Govind Mohan over the police’s handling of the student protest at Jantar Mantar. The post was subsequently geo-blocked in India at the government's request.

The mismatch between the stated legal basis for his detention and the actual line of interrogation suggests the government’s real aim was to question him about a more politically sensitive disclosure while detaining him on another pretext.

One can only speculate on the intent, but the message is chilling: critics will themselves be treated as the problem, rather than the substance of what they say. Leaks about internal friction over the use of police force are evidently treated as more threatening to the state than the unjustified use of force itself.

The incident fits the broad pattern of the Modi government’s intolerance of dissent and dissenters. State machinery is used swiftly and disproportionately in response to an inconvenient public statement or social media post and with an intensity that is aimed at making an example of the dissenters. This is what happened with Ali Khan Mahmudabad, a professor at Ashoka University, who was arrested in May 2025 on a complaint by a Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) youth leader over a social media post questioning the optics of Operation Sindoor briefings. He was accused of inciting rebellion, insulting religious beliefs and sedition. Had the Supreme Court not intervened urgently, Mr Mahmudabad may have been behind bars.

Even in the recent Gen Z protests, mass FIRs were filed swiftly and indiscriminately at the point of protest, to be withdrawn later because of the public embarrassment generated by further protests, public pressure and the courts. Notice that the correction came from outside the executive. After leaving the FIRs on record, exposing students to legal jeopardy, and sending its own chilling message, the state had to actually enlist the intervention of the Supreme Court to withdraw the FIRs under pressure, with the Solicitor General noting the possibility that a magistrate might reject closure reports filed by the police. The Centre needed the Supreme Court’s help to retrace its steps precisely because its instinct is to file FIRs first and sort things out later.

The operational pattern is consistent: Delegitimise critics first, follow with police action and political mobilisation via statements and social media trolling, and negotiate or retreat only if a movement becomes too large to suppress.

Compare this with the Delhi Police's slowness in taking action against Swatantra Bharadwaj, a Hindutva influencer who bragged on camera about “cracking open the skull” of Sanjay Kumar, father of a dalit protester. He boasted of using a police-issue baton — visuals show him displaying it during the protest — and claimed that his political connections would keep him out of jail.

It took two months of sustained public pressure and a day-long protest by Opposition groups before an FIR was even registered by the Delhi Police. Further pressure was required before a public police assurance of arresting him “within 72 hours” and his final arrest.

Who gets an FIR filed against them under this regime is shaped both by top-down party strategy and by decentralised Hindutva supporters and local police incentives. However, the pattern consistently favours the ruling party's political interests. The inversion of urgency, with swift, disproportionate state action against perceived critics of the government, and reluctance to act against political supporters of the regime is nothing new for the BJP government.

Every criticism — individual or organised — is first framed as a national security issue, a conspiracy, or anti-national, and treated as a law-and-order problem rather than a normal feature of democracy. Delegitimisation often begins at the top, with Prime Minister Modi introducing or amplifying derogatory labels for critics, later picked up by party leaders and the IT cell for amplification: Khan Market gang, Andolanjeevi, Naamdar vs Kaamdar, Urban Naxal, Dimagi Naxal. Party leaders have added their own: Tukde-tukde gang, Sickular, Libtards, Presstitutes, Breaking-India forces. The signal down the line is that anyone tagged with these labels is fair game for attack, whether from militant party sympathisers or coercive police action.

In a properly functioning democracy, the government’s response would be more mature: Defending its policies while recognising citizens’ legitimate right to oppose, criticise, or organise against it. But democratic norms of this kind seem alien to the ruling party.

The farmers’ movement was branded Khalistani, anti-national, and foreign-inspired before the government eventually capitulated to its demands. Twenty-two-year-old climate activist Disha Ravi, who supported the farmers, was accused of creating and sharing a “toolkit”, leading to conspiracy and sedition charges. The CAA-NRC protests were framed as questions of national loyalty and communal polarisation. When women wrestlers who had brought India international glory challenged a powerful BJP figure, they were treated brutally by police — because they had become a law-and-order problem for challenging power.

The argument is not that all raids, police action, and prosecutions are illegitimate, but that the process is systematically skewed against critical voices. The BJP government seems incapable of distinguishing between someone breaking the law and someone opposing its policies. The first can legitimately invite state action; the second is the essence of democratic politics.