The true measure of a constitutional democracy lies not in the authority it wields to enforce compliance, but in the humility with which it engages dissent. A secure republic treats peaceful protest as an opportunity to look into a mirror reflecting the anxieties of its citizenry. A fragile executive, by contrast, treats that same mirror as an enemy, shattering it with lathis and turning a blind eye when the glass pieces fall on the streets outside the gates of power, cutting the veins of its citizens.

What the nation has witnessed in recent days on the streets of the national capital is a deeply troubling demonstration of democratic atrophy. Citizens, primarily young students and peaceful activists, many inspired by the symbolic leadership of the fasting Sonam Wangchuk, gathered to demand accountability on issues touching their very futures. The response from the apparatus of the state was not a dialogue, but a crackdown, silencing their voices with violence and detentions.

Lathi charges broke through crowds of non-violent demonstrators, sending nearly a hundred young men and women to hospital emergency wards with fractures, contusions, and trauma. The sight of police officers wielding batons against unarmed youth, while internet blackouts and closed metro stations throttled the flow of both information and people, felt less like the routine maintenance of public order in a constitutional republic and more like the heavy-handed oppression of a police state. I spoke to a young man at Jantar Mantar who had been hit on the head and below the eye with a lathi and still wore a large bandage to stanch the bleeding. My heart broke to see what the custodians of law and order had done to a youth who was peacefully distributing water to the........

© Indian Express