The lost art of policing a protest

Democracy is fundamentally a noisy business. At its core lies the constitutional right to assemble, to dissent and to demand accountability. As the custodian of public order across three vastly different urban landscapes, from the industrially vibrant and economically crucial terrains of Surat and Vadodara to the hyper-political, high-stakes crucible of the national capital, I have watched the execution of this right evolve. More accurately, I have watched the management of this right deteriorate.

In the contemporary security landscape, we are increasingly confronted with a troubling question: have we lost the art of policing a protest? The short answer is yes. We have drifted away from policing as a nuanced, psychological craft, leaning instead towards a rigid, techno-tactical science. Restoring this lost art requires looking past the riot gear and drones to reclaim the foundational principles of dialogue, proportionality and strategic patience.

To understand what we have lost, we must first understand how the street has changed. The protests were often deeply tied to community identities, labour movements or sudden civic grievances. The policing strategy relied heavily on local intelligence, deep-rooted community ties and the ability of the police leadership to sit across a table with community elders over cups of tea to defuse a crisis before the first placard was raised.

In Delhi, the dynamics of protests shift exponentially as compared to other cities. The national capital does not just host protests, it amplifies them. Here, a protest is rarely just about a local grievance. It is a staged performance for a national audience, heavily mediated by 24-hour news cycles and hyper-reactive social media algorithms. This digital mutation has transformed the physics of crowds:

Flash mobilisation: What used to take weeks of planning now happens in minutes via encrypted messaging apps.

Leaderless structures: Modern protests increasingly lack a singular, identifiable leadership, making traditional negotiation incredibly difficult.

The provocation premium: Success for a modern protester is often measured by capturing a viral video of police high-handedness, creating an environment where baiting the uniform is a deliberate tactic.

In response to this hyper-visibility and unpredictability, the institutional reflex of policing has unfortunately defaulted to over-preparation, fortification and containment. We have replaced the human interface with iron barricades. The degradation of the ‘art’ lies in our growing reliance on kinetic, mechanical responses. When a crowd gathers today, the standard operating procedure often feels remarkably clinical: water cannons, tear gas, lathi-charges and section orders. This kinetic knee-jerk is a systemic failure for several reasons:

1. Force is a blunt instrument. When the police deploy premature force, it validates the crowd’s narrative of an oppressive state. It transforms passive demonstrators into aggressive participants. A single misplaced tear gas shell could turn a manageable crowd of 500 into a rioting mob of 5,000 within 20 minutes.

2. Drones, facial recognition and water cannons are excellent tools for situational awareness and tactical deterrence, but they cannot look a frustrated citizen in the eye. When we rely solely on technology to manage crowds, we distance ourselves from the human emotion fuelling the protest. You cannot algorithmically de-escalate human anger.

3. Every time a protest is handled with disproportionate force, the institutional capital of the police department depreciates. Police has to live and work intimately with the community long before and after the protest ends, and brutal crowd control tactics permanently poison the well of community policing. If we are to revive the art of crowd management, we must look at policing not as the suppression of a disruption, but as the dynamic management of a democratic expression.

Based on years of handling volatile situations across Gujarat and Delhi, the best practices boil down to four pillars:

i) The art of policing begins days before anyone steps onto the asphalt. Establish continuous communication with organisers. Understand their itinerary, their pain points and their expectations.

ii) A crowd is not a monolith. Within any large protest, there are distinct layers: the peaceful idealists, the curious onlookers, the media and a tiny fraction of agent provocateurs looking to incite violence. The art lies in surgical isolation. Rather than treating the entire gathering as hostile, police forces must be trained to identify and isolate the instigators, while actively protecting the right of the peaceful majority to continue their demonstration.

iii) How the police look matters immensely. Marching out hundreds of officers in full body armour, carrying shields and firearms, at the very beginning of a peaceful protest sends a non-verbal cue of impending war. The ideal posture is one of ‘staged readiness’. Keep the heavy enforcement teams out of direct sight, utilising standard-uniformed officers for initial line management. It projects calm, confidence and accessibility, rather than hostility.

iv) We train our officers extensively on how to fire tear gas, handle lathis and form defensive walls. We rarely train them in the art of verbal de-escalation under extreme stress. The goal of crowd policing is not to ‘win’ a battle against the citizens, but to ensure everyone goes home safe at the end of the day.

To conclude, the term ‘order’ must never be pursued at the absolute cost of ‘law’ and constitutional liberties. To police a protest effectively is to understand that the people on the other side of the barricade are not enemies of the state; they are stakeholders in it. By marrying modern situational intelligence with old-school dialogue, strategic empathy and calculated restraint, we can restore the delicate balance that defines a mature democracy. The badge we wear is not a shield against our citizens, but a promise to protect their rights while upholding peace.

Asthana is former police commissioner, Delhi.