While Gandhi Jayanti is still fresh on our minds and the right to peaceful assembly is in the news again, let’s look at a few things that may be relevant.

The Modi government is stopping protesters from gathering as I write, because it wants to shield the chief election commissioner from accountability. His misconduct is not disputed: the facts are before us, but the government has adopted what we Indians say is a ‘jo karna hai kar lo’ posture. Is it sustainable? We will get to that, but first, a detour.

Gandhi’s opening protest in India was in 1917, when he was 47. He learned that the tenant farmers of Champaran were bound by law to plant indigo on 15 per cent of their land, whether they wanted to or not, under a system called tinkathia.

Gandhi decided to go on a fact-finding mission to Champaran and was ordered by the British magistrate to leave, which Gandhi decided not to do. He writes in his autobiography about what happened next: 'A sort of friendliness sprang up between the officials — Collector, Magistrate, Police Superintendent — and myself. I might have legally resisted the notices served on me. Instead I accepted them all, and my conduct towards the officials was correct. They thus saw that I did not want to offend them personally, but that I wanted to offer civil resistance to their orders.

'In........

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