When Dissent Becomes Disorder: Public Order, Police Violence, and the Limits of Liberal Constitutionalism in India

The liberal-democratic state is constituted by an abiding contradiction, it must retain coercive authority sufficient to preserve public order, even as it purports to guarantee the dissent through which democratic politics is enacted. This paper interrogates that contradiction through the police response to the December 2019 protests at Jamia Millia Islamia against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, asking how the invocation of "public order" effects the discursive and juridical transformation of political dissent into an object of coercive governance, and by what authority this transformation is sanctioned.
The Jamia episode resists reduction to a singular narrative. Genuine violence occurred in the vicinity of the campus, yet the police intervention within it generated allegations of disproportionate force, which the state has consistently characterised as necessary and proportionate. The paper contends that this very indeterminacy is theoretically productive: police violence cannot be adequately explained as individual misconduct or as institutional failure, but must instead be situated within a broader legal-administrative apparatus through which dissent is reconstituted as disorder, thereby conferring legitimacy upon exceptional coercive practice. The same doctrinal category that authorises such intervention subsequently furnishes the grounds—official duty protection under Section 197 CrPC—on which judicial scrutiny of that intervention is foreclosed, while adjudication on the underlying petitions remains pending six years hence. Deferral, no less than dismissal, thus operates as a mechanism through which the public-order frame consolidates its own legitimacy.
Situating the case within liberal constitutionalist theory, theorisations of coercive state power, and the post-colonial state, and employing proportionality as the constitutional measure of permissible coercion, the paper conducts a qualitative discourse analysis of judicial proceedings, NHRC findings, police submissions, and journalistic material, thereby illuminating the unsettled relationship between legality, coercion, and democratic restraint in post-colonial South Asia.
Keywords: Public order, Liberal constitutionalism, Coercive state power, Post-colonial democracy, Police violence