Siwan (Bihar): When student protests broke out in Bihar last month, Aman Kumar Lal came into form.

Bihar records the highest number of student protests after Kerala, national data show. Nineteen-year-old Lal has been a part of quite a few of those protests in recent years.

He knew the drill. Gather around Patna’s Gandhi Maidan. Some angry slogans, some tongue-in-cheek digs. Wait for the police to arrive. Dodge their lathis. Enjoy their water cannons. Climb their barricades. Feel powerful. Return home pleased.

Except, Patna now had a new dispensation. For the first time ever, the Bihar government was being run by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), with chief minister Samrat Choudhary at the helm.

Lal didn’t think twice. He left home on the morning of July 22, when students called for a protest. Except, this time, he couldn’t follow the script. A few hours into the protest, he was detained and then arrested by the police.

“We thought they would let us go. But they refused to,” said Lal, adding that he felt “surprised” at this change of tactic.

In custody, Lal was interrogated repeatedly, and was asked questions about who was “funding” him. Lal laughed. “I said, all the ration the government gives people like us has fuelled me.”

The cops didn’t see the humour in it. Lal spent seven days in custody, and was released only on July 29.

Lal’s experience, in a state known to tolerate student protests, even if grudgingly, is a part of a larger pattern: the changed approach of the Bihar government in quelling such demonstrations.

The most glaring sign of this was the clutch of visuals that emerged from Siwan, where police officials fired AK-47 rifles and pistols at crowds gathered in the heart of the city on July 25, when student outfits had called for a Bihar Bandh. At least three people were injured when officials fired multiple rounds of bullets into the crowd. The Wire had, on August 25, reported how the three are struggling to recover, even one month after the incident.

In quelling the protests, the Bihar Police had filed 64 First Information Reports (FIRs) against protesters and thousands of ‘unknown’ persons. It had also arrested or detained 694 people, of which at least 339 were minors.

More proof of this came into public sight when, on August 26, hundreds of Bihari students and job aspirants gathered to demand the cancellation of the 70th Bihar Public Service Commission preliminary exam. As part of its effort to shut them down, the Bihar Police forcefully took a six-year-old protester out of the protest site by carrying him in their arms.

Such excesses are increasingly the norm. Our reporting from across Bihar shows that the state police adopted violence, intimidation and arbitrary detentions as methods to quell the protests. In the process, they ended up violating constitutional safeguards and procedural norms.

The Wire reached out to the head of........

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