We were witnesses to numerous protests in the past and are in the present too. Democracy provides for it. People have the right to exercise it to put forward their legitimate demands.

The protests are increasingly turning violent in recent days. Anti-CAA protest for example ended up in a violent riot after a long-drawn blockade of Saheenbagh. Lives were lost, properties worth crores destroyed. Piecing the threads together, the investigators stumbled upon astonishing facts. The conspiracy was going on alongside the protest to create mayhem. The participants and conspirators were so many and from as diverse a field as politics, radical organisation named PFI, business groups, students, activists, films and journalism. They were well-armed and flush with funds. They struck first with stone-pelting at Jamia university. The conflagration spread very fast to take the shape of a full-scale riot.

The assumption that the protest will remain peaceful proved to be wrong. Executive and the judiciary both failed to assess the motivation behind the whole protest.

We are seeing an encore of the same fiasco in the form of farmer’s protest. The background is same. They don’t accept a law passed by parliament. They want repeal of the law. They won’t budge to any concession extended by the government. This is an open blackmail and threat. They have laid siege to lifelines of Delhites by blocking their roads. Judiciary is utterly clueless and has passed the buck to the executive.

On the top of the above, god knows what constraints led the government to allow the tractor rally by protesters on republic day. The result is widespread mayhem. It was a horrifying sight to see our security forces being upstaged by a kind of invasion by a blood-thirsty mob wielding swords, stones, sticks and all they could lay their hands on to use as weapons. Our police were unarmed. They could possibly have not pulled the trigger at the so called farmers. It would have had unforeseen consequences.

The organisers of the protest probably wished for such a scenario playing out. They could have used that to shake the foundation of the present government. This is absolutely not about anything to do with farmers’ interest. Opposition and the so called farmer leaders have joined hands to create anarchy in the streets. Khalistanis, proxies of pakistan, paid agents of China and urban naxals have joined forces to tear the country into pieces.

The moot point is, when would we learn our lessons? Why should the magnanimity of democracy be extended to anarchists time and again? Who is fooling whom in the name of right to protest? Why should common citizens bear the brunt of violent mobs outside their homes? We don’t expect our judiciary and the executive to be so gullible as to allow anarchy to prevail in the name of right to protest. The organisers of the protests must be held liable for any harm to public property or lives. The way things unfolded at the tractor rally, the court should have intervened by now and ordered arrest of organisers for flouting agreed norms of protest.

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