The yellow barricades went up this week at both ends of the tree-lined road beside Jantar Mantar, the 18th-century astronomical observatory that has served as the capital’s most visible stage for dissent for more than three decades. Paramilitary personnel in their hundreds now stand where farmers, students, grieving parents and ex-soldiers once gathered. Delhi Police has formally revoked the site’s status as a designated protest zone, directing demonstrators to three alternative venues — two distant from the seat of power, the third a sprawling ground that charges tens of thousands of rupees a day and is often booked months in advance.
The move marks the potential end of an era. Since 1993, when the Congress government shut down demonstrations at the Boat Club lawns opposite the old parliament, Jantar Mantar has been the place where ordinary Indians came to be heard. Its closure follows a summer of unprecedented upheaval led by the Cockroach Janta Party — a Gen Z collective that began as a joke and ended up forcing the resignation of federal education minister Dharmendra Pradhan after tens of thousands descended on the site. Within weeks, the road was sealed. A subsequent attempt by CJP supporters to march there demanding the election chief’s removal was met with a police crackdown.
A geography of containment
The decision did not emerge in a vacuum. Historians have long traced a deliberate pattern: each new regulation has pushed protest further from the corridors of power. Harleen Kaur, whose 2023 paper mapped this shift, notes that Jantar Mantar itself — situated three kilometres from Parliament House — was originally chosen to contain crowds at a manageable distance from the prime minister’s residence. The Boat Club lawns, spacious and directly opposite the old parliament, offered a far more potent platform. Their loss was the first contraction.
Mary E John, a gender studies scholar who protested at the Boat Club as a student in the 1980s, remembers a climate where demonstration was simply part of civic life. “We took it for granted,” she says. When Jantar Mantar replaced it, the narrower road felt claustrophobic. Yet it became a crucible. Activists recall the press conferences held under tarpaulin sheets during monsoon downpours, the chains fastened to railings outside the prime minister’s residence, the solidarities forged between Tibetan protesters, anti-dam campaigners, and lone travellers arriving with nothing but a placard and a grievance.
Rachna Dhingra of the Bhopal Group for Information and Action camped there for five months in 2008. “It can be lonely to protest,” she says, “but that place became a home for so many of us. We shared each other’s stories, struggles and victories.”
Infrastructure, cost and the right to assemble
Delhi Police says it acted on a Supreme Court suggestion to identify alternative sites with adequate infrastructure. The National Green Tribunal had cited precisely that lack — along with complaints from local residents — when it ordered the site shut in 2017. The Supreme Court overturned that ban a year later, upholding constitutional guarantees of free speech and peaceful assembly.
But the new venues tell a different story. Ramlila Ground, the only alternative with comparable capacity, charges fees that put sustained protest beyond the reach of most grassroots movements. The other two sites lie far from parliament, severing the symbolic and practical link between demonstrators and the institutions they seek to challenge. Dhingra, who has attempted protests at Jantar Mantar in recent years, says the rules have tightened dramatically: no overnight stays permitted, permissions required well in advance. “Where do you go with hundreds of people who have travelled all the way to the capital to protest?” she asks.
Dipa Sinha, an academic associated with the Right to Food campaign, points out that Jantar Mantar’s proximity to the Press Club and Constitution Club made media coverage accessible and allowed politicians to drop by and meet protesters directly. Landmark legislation — the rural jobs guarantee scheme, the National Food Security Act, the Forest Rights Act — took shape in those conversations. “It was a place where you could discuss issues with people who came to Delhi from across the country,” she says.
The summer that changed everything
The Cockroach Janta Party’s rise was as unconventional as its name. Born from internet satire, the collective channelled youth frustration over examination irregularities and institutional opacity into a movement that brought central Delhi to a standstill. Pradhan’s resignation was a rare, tangible victory for a leaderless, digitally native protest. The state’s response was swift: barricades, personnel, a blanket ban.
Last week’s crackdown on the follow-up march — this time targeting the election commission — suggested a broader intolerance for sustained occupation. Yet the Supreme Court is now hearing pleas challenging the site’s removal. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi and CJP leaders have vowed that Jantar Mantar “belongs to the people” and will be reclaimed.
For now, the road is quiet. The shopkeepers in the adjacent lane keep their heads down; one folded his hands and declined to speak. The observatory’s ancient instruments — the samrat yantra, the jai prakash — track the heavens as they have for three centuries, indifferent to the human drama unfolding at their feet.
Why it Matters
Jantar Mantar was never merely a patch of pavement; it was the physical manifestation of a constitutional promise — that power must listen when the governed speak. Its closure represents more than a logistical shift. By relocating dissent to expensive, distant, permission-gated venues, the state has effectively rationed the right to assemble, reserving proximity to power for those with resources and advance planning. The farmers who camped at Delhi’s borders for months, the women of Shaheen Bagh who occupied a neighbourhood for weeks, the students who marched in 2012 — they all understood that visibility is leverage. When the gatekeepers decide where the gates stand, the question is no longer whether protest is permitted, but whether it can still matter.
