Outside the police station, this dawn, Ankita Bhandari felt like our sister too…
At the Delhi protests with just enough Hindi to order tea. A protester from Chennai describes his day jumping over barricades, getting detained, escaping out of a police bus, and marching with thousands in a city alien to him
By Harish in Delhi
On October 11, 2026, my last day as a policy consultant assistant in Chennai, my social media feed was alive with news of protests in Delhi. Opposition parties and democratic groups had called for a massive march to the Supreme Court the next day, demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged vote chori.
By afternoon, scrolling no longer felt like enough.
I wanted to be there.
As I handed my last files to my boss, I told him. As a young Indian, I felt I had to do my bit, and right then, that meant getting to Delhi. He heard me out and said, “You must go,” without a second thought.
Then came the practical question: where would I stay? I didn’t know, but I hoped I would find a place to stay once I got to Delhi. He then magnanimously offered me his flat in Central Delhi. I was elated.
Within hours, I had booked the cheapest seat on the 2:40 am IndiGo flight from Chennai, packed a small bag, and left.
I have been to many protests in Chennai. Delhi, though, was unfamiliar territory. My Hindi was the broken, basic aata-hai-jaata-hai kind, enough to order tea, but not much else.
My friends sent me off with a survival checklist: turn off Face ID on my mobile, carry power banks, pack ORS, wear a mask. When I told one friend I wasn’t afraid of being arrested, he laughed. “The mask is to save you from the Delhi pollution, you idiot.”
Another friend taught me how to find the emergency exits in a police station!
On the flight, one worry kept circling in my head: what if the government shut down the metro and buses? Getting to Delhi was one thing. Getting to the protest could be another.
Outside Delhi airport, the driver of an ordinary black-and-yellow taxi asked if I needed a cab. I told him to take me to “BKS Marg.” He looked confused. “Baba Kharak Singh Marg,” I clarified.
He nodded, and we were off to the flat. A few hours earlier, I had been handing over files in Chennai. Now I was in Delhi, with a place to stay, a bag full of precautions, and just enough Hindi to order tea.
By morning, news was trickling in: opposition MPs and activists were gathering at the Constitution Club in Central Delhi. I went over and slipped through a side gate without attracting attention. The private club looked more like an army camp. CRPF personnel and Delhi Police lined the corridors in riot helmets, carrying lathis and shields. Outside, large, empty buses waited with their engines running.
For the next couple of hours, I watched faces I knew from television pass by: Yogendra Yadav, Aishe Ghosh, and various MPs. Beyond the gates, party workers shouted slogans as the heat climbed. A young girl I met there lasted two hours before giving up. She was fasting for Navratri and had grown too dizzy to stand.
When the march finally began, the leaders boarded the air-conditioned buses. Through the clear windows, they waved to the party workers walking in the heat. The buses rolled forward. The crowd moved with them. I joined on foot.
At Barakhamba Road junction, I found Sam, a friend from journalism school. With the phone networks jammed, running into her was pure luck—and meant I could finally follow the first safety rule my friends had given me: always move in a group. Together, we walked alongside the buses toward Bhagwan Das Road. I still hadn’t eaten.
The road was packed with party workers, students, and ordinary citizens, some straight from their offices. In an open van, I spotted Priyanka Gandhi, Akhilesh Yadav, and Neha Bora among other leaders. But even with Sam beside me, I was afraid of being beaten or picked up. I kept thinking of reporters holding their Press cards in the air and getting beaten anyway.
If a press card couldn’t protect them, what chance did I have—a protester from Chennai who could barely make myself understood in Hindi?
Sam told me to calm down. If anything went wrong, she said, there were plenty of lawyers waiting to help.
Near the Supreme Court, heavy barricades blocked the road. Behind the protesters stood rank upon rank of police, almost one officer for every protester. A voice crackled over a loudspeaker, reading out legal warnings in Hindi. I couldn’t understand the words, but the message seemed clear enough: the protest was illegal. Disperse.
The crowd, some 10,000 strong, in my vicinity, and the police settled into a strange rhythm. The police advanced with their lathis. We turned and ran. Then, realising nobody had been hit, we surged back to the barricades and resumed our slogans. Forward, back, repeat. Above us, photographers climbed trees for a better view. At street level, policemen filmed our faces on small cameras.
Moving through the crowd, I spotted independent journalists and reporters from small outlets, carrying mobile rigs. There were more of them than television crews from big networks. Then my friend Shahana pointed straight at me and yelled at a constable: “Here is Gyanesh (Kumar)! Why aren’t you arresting him?” The constable looked completely lost. Whatever else he made of the joke, he was not amused.
I had never spent ten straight hours on my feet. At five o’clock, another friend, Snehidha, finally reached us. With metro stations shut and roads closed by the police, she had walked for several hours to get there. By then, it was over. The Chief Justice of India had refused to meet the Opposition leaders. They stayed inside their buses and turned back.
On our stretch of Bhagwan Das Road, the crowd dispersed without a lathi charge or a single detention. Thousands were detained elsewhere in the city that week. Perhaps we got lucky. Perhaps the police on our stretch were simply in a better mood.
Cut to October 14.
That afternoon, I was at Connaught Place, where flash protests were breaking out. By evening, news came that Ankita Bhandari’s parents were sitting at India Gate, demanding justice for their daughter—the teenager murdered in Rishikesh in 2022. Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi had joined them in the protest.
I took an auto to India Gate. Barricades blocked the way. I climbed over two, squeezed through a gap, and reached the spot around eight. It was nothing like the march two days earlier. Rahul and Priyanka had left by then. A few party spokesmen delivered sound bites to television cameras, then drove away. The big media crews packed up. With their lights gone, the road fell dark.
Thirty or forty of us remained.
We sat around Ankita’s elderly parents. No microphones. No slogans. After four years of fighting to have their case heard, they spread a thin sheet on the cold road, lay down, and tried to sleep.
At twenty to four in the morning, someone came running through the darkness. The police were coming. Ten minutes later, the vans arrived. A loudspeaker ordered us to clear the road. Nobody got up.
We pressed closer, sat on the pavement, and hooked our arms through one another’s elbows. Your mouth goes dry when you sit like that. You are terrified. Every instinct tells you to run, but your arms are locked with the people beside you. To move would mean letting go.
First came the warnings. Then the police began pulling people from the edges of our circle. They took Ankita’s parents too.
Male policemen tried to drag away women protesters. We resisted until they called in female officers. I kept recording with my phone in one hand. Then two policemen grabbed me. Buttons tore from my shirt as they hauled me away and threw me into a bus.
My friends had warned me about the police vans—the mobile jails, with no windows, packed so tightly you could barely breathe. This, at least, was an ordinary green city bus.
About thirty of us were inside. Four or five policemen struggled to keep the doors shut. But the iron bars across a window were brittle. Three of us pushed until the bars gave way, leaving a gap wide enough to squeeze through. I scrambled out and dropped onto the road. My knees took the landing.
About a dozen of us escaped. We turned back to help the others, then dragged roadside barricades in front of the second bus to stop it from leaving. The police had to get out, surround the bus, and run beside it all the way to Tilak Marg police station.
We followed on foot.
Outside the station gate, we shouted for the parents to be released. We had expected the police to hold everyone until eight in the morning. Instead, at around 4:45 am, the gate opened. Everyone came out.
Then two people arrived on motorbikes carrying cases of bottled water. Someone passed around a power bank, and our dead phones began coming back to life. We stood on the pavement in Delhi’s cold morning air, dusty and thirsty, with torn shirts, scraped knees, and arms twisted sore. We shared water and momos.
None of it felt like hardship then.
The cameras were gone. The leaders were gone. There was a nip in the air. Around us stood people who had nothing to gain by staying, but had stayed. In that small circle outside the police station, Ankita felt like our sister too…
Harish is an independent journalist based in Chennai.