New Delhi: Viral footage from Delhi’s October 10 protests against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar has raised uncomfortable questions about the boundary between policing and partisan muscle. Groups identifying themselves as members of the Hindu Raksha Dal moved freely through demonstration areas in the presence of uniformed police, confronting and assaulting unarmed protesters while chanting support for the force and for Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The protests, organised by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), focused on alleged irregularities in the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. Prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the Bharatiya Nagarik Suraksha Sanhita were in force, and police detained thousands of protesters, journalists, lawyers and lawmakers. Against this backdrop, videos showed saffron-clad men and others in civilian clothes threatening demonstrators, chasing them, and physically assaulting them. In one widely circulated clip, men assaulted a male protester and manhandled a woman, pushing her to the ground and pulling at her clothes, with police personnel visible at the scene. Other footage captured groups shouting, “Delhi Police tum lathi bajao, hum tumhare saath hain” (Delhi Police, wield your batons; we stand with you), while declaring they had turned out to support the Prime Minister and would not fear arrest. Some gave media bites asserting they were there to protect the police and counter those raising slogans against the government and the BJP.
Hindu Raksha Dal chief Pinki Chaudhary (Bhupendra Tomar) later claimed responsibility on social media, identifying the assailants as his workers and boasting that the organisation delivers on its promises by “setting the minds of cockroaches straight.” He posted videos of members carrying sticks and had earlier appealed for supporters to reach the protest sites with lathis. Four men—Raman Saini, Vivekanand alias Vivek, Kapil Kumar and Ravinder Singh alias Govind Hindu—were arrested the next day after the footage went viral. Police said they took suo motu action after learning the men might leave Delhi-NCR. The arrests are significant, yet they arrived after the groups had already operated in plain sight for hours, despite the prohibitory orders that applied to everyone else.
The selective application of force is what has unsettled observers. Unarmed protesters faced large-scale detentions and restrictions. Meanwhile, men who openly announced their intent to support police action and who assaulted demonstrators—including women—moved with apparent impunity until the videos forced a response. Earlier CJP protests in July had already drawn scrutiny over plainclothes personnel carrying lathis; Delhi Police later defended such deployments as lawful “spotters” for crowd control. The October videos revive the same question: who was authorised to act, under what orders, and why did the presence of uniformed officers not deter or immediately halt the assaults?
If these groups operated with the tacit understanding or passive tolerance of the police, accountability must extend beyond the four arrested individuals. If their free movement reflected broader political encouragement from elements linked to the ruling dispensation or affiliated organisations, the implications are graver still. Public confidence in the police rests on the perception of impartiality. When footage repeatedly shows one set of actors restrained or detained while another set, identifying with the government and claiming to aid the force, operates unchecked, that confidence erodes. The subsequent arrests do not erase the initial images of non-intervention.
Independent verification of every circulating clip remains essential; some reports note that police later removed or detained certain groups. Yet the pattern across multiple locations—Connaught Place, DDU Marg and elsewhere—and the open claims of responsibility by the outfit’s leadership cannot be dismissed as isolated misbehaviour. A transparent inquiry into the command decisions that day, the status of plainclothes deployments, and the reasons for delayed intervention is the minimum required to restore credibility. Without it, the suspicion that the state looked the other way when convenient will linger, damaging not only the police but the larger claim of rule of law that any government must uphold. The videos have already done their work in the public domain; official answers must now match their clarity.
