Nearly 11 hours and many appeals later, hundreds of Delhi police personnel who spent the larger part of the day outside the police headquarters in the national capital after their colleagues were assaulted by lawyers over the past few days ended the unprecedented protest late on Tuesday evening.
When it started just a little after 9 am on Tuesday, there were just about 30-35 policemen, many in their uniform, who stood outside the Delhi Police headquarters. It was a symbolic gesture. They wouldn’t raise slogans but let their silent protest drive home the message.
But that number rose to a few hundred in just a matter of two hours, and kept swelling, witnesses said, to a peak of 2,000 or so around the time Police Commissioner Amulya Patnaik stepped out to address them. The protests also grew louder.
Patnaik appealed to them to disperse, reminding them about their responsibility to uphold the law and ask them to trust the judicial inquiry that had been ordered into the violence at Tis Hazari court complex on Saturday over a lawyer parking his car.
Nearly 20 policemen and many lawyers were injured. Two senior police officers were shunted out by the high court the next day and two policemen suspended.
Lawyers had chased and attacked policemen, journalists and civilians in and around south Delhi’s Saket on Sunday. A video showing lawyers slapping a policeman in south Delhi was circulated widely including by senior police officers.
The image of a policeman being humiliated and assaulted had struck a chord, a police officer said. It was so powerful that subordinate police officials stood before television cameras to speak up, occasionally even against their superiors.
“If you want to suspend us, do it. We’ll sit at home. But we haven’t joined this profession to get kicked around,” Mahendra Singh, a policeman at the protest told news agency Reuters.
Police chief Amulya Patnaik tried to pacify the protesters. “The last few days have been testing for us. A judicial inquiry is underway and I request you to have faith in the process,” he said, telling them to return to their assignments. It was early afternoon.
Over the next several hours, there were more such appeals, many of them accompanied by a status report on their demands. Like a Rs 25,000 compensation to the injured policemen or a promise to ask the high court to review its order suspending the two policemen.
As the protesters stayed on well after dusk, senior police officers figured it a problem was that this wasn’t really an organized protest. And there were no leaders to negotiate and the list of demands that the protesters spoke about appeared to be getting longer and wider.
So it helped that senior police officers went around to individually ask protesters to leave.
By then, Lt Governor Anil Baijal had held one round of review meeting with the police brass and apart from announcing compensation for the injured policemen, decided to file a review petition in the high court against its order on Sunday.