Shaheen Bagh–Public needs open spaces to express dissent

Syyed Mansoor Agha   New Delhi:  A Supreme Court bench has disapproved of the Shaheen Bagh sit-in on several counts.
The court was referring to the spontaneous protests broke in mid-December 2019 after the Citizenship (Amendment) Act 2019 (CAA), was pushed through in parliament to grant migrants, except Muslims, instant Indian Citizenship. The law was laced with an open threat to be followed by NRC and to  throw-out  all who fail to prove their citizenship. General public that felt these were discriminatory laws gathered in Shaheen Bagh to hold sit-in protest. However after the COVID-9 pandemic broke out in the last week of March, the protest was suspended (not called off). It was believed that the pandemic would affect people more in crowds than those who were maintaining safe distance of six feet with each other.
The court case In mid-January, a lawyer filed a petition in Delhi HC complaining about commuter’s difficulties because of a blockage on Kalindi Kunj-Shaheen Bagh ‎stretch due to sit-in. The sit-in covered hardly 100 meters stretch on one side of the double road. Another road parallel to Yamuna (Pushta road) remained opened. In fact, blockage was caused after Kalindi Kunj-Noida Road was blocked on the UP-side of Yamuna barrage at a point over 2 Km from the protest site.
The HC disposed of the petition with the observation, ‘Delhi Police has powers to control traffic… should take a call based on ground realities.’ The litigant went in appeal. The SC verdict came six months after clearing the road and prayer of the plaintiff/appellant had virtually become infructuous. However, a three-judge bench on Wednesday (7 October) ruled that public protests must be “in designated areas alone” and “public ways and public spaces cannot be occupied… and that too indefinitely”.
It said, “democracy and dissent go hand in hand, but then the demonstrations expressing dissent have to be in  designated places alone ”. The Shaheen Bagh protest, it said, “Was not even one of the protests taking place in  an undesignated area , ‎but was a blockage of a public way which caused grave inconvenience to commuters.”