Chandigarh, Jul 31 (PTI) Protest crowds in India are now anchored in social media and have become durable political actors rather than passing agitations, former Haryana Director General of Police O P Singh said on Friday, urging heads of police forces to change their methods and to explain their operations publicly in their own words.
In an open letter published on his newsletter, Singh, who retired as Haryana DGP in December last year after 33 years of service, wrote that “this summer’s gathering in the national capital assembled online, held its ground, saw a minister leave office, negotiated, and is now claiming political space of its own.” He said this could be read “as an operational fact rather than a political one.” On Saturday, youth-led movement Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) called off its 36-day agitation at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar after Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan resigned and the government accepted its other demands.
The CJP, which began as a satirical online movement, had led a sit-in protest since June 20, demanding Pradhan’s resignation, accountability over the NEET-UG 2026 paper leak and irregularities in the CBSE’s on-screen marking process, besides seeking wider reforms in the conduct of public examinations.
The agitation got support from thousands of students across the country and that of major opposition parties. On July 20, the protesters carried out a massive march to Parliament, witnessing a strong police response involving tear gas and lathi-charge.
“People who can raise a crowd in India today are increasingly figures with a following and an ambition, and the crowd they raise is anchored in social media and harvests video by design,” Singh wrote, adding, “This is not a season. It is a new actor, and your force will be dealing with it for the rest of your service.” Singh said the composition of such crowds had changed in ways policing had not adjusted to.
Young women had taken part in Indian demonstrations for generations; that is not the change, he wrote.
“The change is the camera in their hands, and the perfect understanding of what it is for,” the former DGP said, describing a protester filming a policeman from two feet away and holding her ground “because the footage is the point”. Influencers worked the edges “for clips” while celebrities “come for an hour and are photographed”, he said.
More consequential for policing, Singh said, was that such crowds arrived with nobody in charge — “no union, no party office, no marshals, nobody a district magistrate can telephone at night”. That left policemen on the ground to separate the few intent on violence from the many who were not, “in seconds, in bad light, on camera”.
Singh said this produced an imbalance no amount of ground policing could correct.
“A policeman doing his job correctly produces no footage at all; one who errs produces the only footage anybody sees,” he said, noting that more than 100 police personnel were injured in a single afternoon in Delhi in July and that almost nothing of what injured them was filmed.
Singh was sceptical of the way police forces currently respond. He wrote, “The public relations cell that sat in no briefing and took no decision drafts something defensible, sends it up for clearance, and issues it once the news cycle has closed … It is nobody’s fault in particular, and it answers nobody’s question. A force cannot hand its voice to people who were not in the room.” Citing a corporate practice, Singh said more than two-thirds of Fortune 100 chief executives maintain a public profile, and boards now expect such a presence built years before an executive reaches the top job.
“We are the last command still run by proxy,” he said.
He further proposed that a police chief write 300 words to his own force, signed and in the language his men use — setting out what has changed on the streets, what is expected of them, what the chief will back them for and what follows if a man exceeds his brief — and publish it the same hour it is issued.
Such a page would do two jobs: For the force it would be “training on the go”, with the doctrine reaching the field in the week it was needed; for everyone else, it would be civic education, teaching what a cordon is for, how many warnings precede a move and when a commander must pull his men back.
“None of it is secret. Almost none of it has ever been explained,” the former DGP wrote, adding that greater openness would also expose police mistakes and that this should be accepted. “A public able to recognise a correct dispersal is one able to recognise a genuine excess. At present, every clip looks the same.” Singh also urged the officers to answer hostile questions on camera, “as any chief executive now does four times a year” and to repeat the exercise weekly.
He said he had adopted the practice during his own service. “I spoke up and began writing such letters because I took charge of a troubled state,” he wrote, “I pass on the method because I left an approving one.” PTI SUN VSD RUK RUK
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