The chappals we leave behind: What Minuthong taught Jantar Mantar
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Yenning
Some visuals haunt you and stay with you forever. There are three that stay with me.
The first one is the visual of the chappals and sandals, thousands in different shapes, sizes and colours, of the Imas (mothers of Manipur) at Minuthong, who, in an attempt to evade the security forces’ tear gas canisters and mock bombs, and the lathi(baton)charge, left them behind. Yet they did not stop chanting “No Compromise on Manipur’s Integrity” and “Long Live Manipur.” The protest took place in 2001. During the June Uprising of 2001 in Manipur, 24 people lost their lives when security forces opened fire on demonstrators protesting the extension of the NSCN (IM) ceasefire “without territorial limits.” Many others were injured in the clashes.
The second one is the sight of students of the Tamphasana Girls’ Higher Secondary School, hit by the water cannon, was a sharp contrast to their light pink shirts and bright yellow phaneks huddled on the ground against the force of the water.
The third one is the sight of a Manipur University student (boy) in his navy-blue trousers and white shirt, beaten up mercilessly by a Manipur traffic police constable. It was a one-to-one duel at the traffic island, only that the police wielded a baton and the boy was biting the ground, bleeding profusely. None intervened. None stopped. The traffic police stopped only after he was tired.
Both incidents occurred in the month of July 2004, in the aftermath of Thangjam Manorama’s rape and murder by the Assam Rifles. Students were marching towards the Chief Minister’s Bungalow. But they were stopped in front of the Raj Bhavan (currently Lok Bhavan).
A few days later, to be precise, on 15 July 2004, twelve mothers had disrobed themselves in front of Kangla Fort, then the headquarters of the Assam Rifles in Imphal. They held a banner that read: “Indian Army Rape Us,” and shouted slogans condemning the Assam Rifles and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act.
The mothers’ nude protest and other recent mob-induced visuals, I am not including them in my list. Today, we are talking about police atrocities and excesses of the security forces against peaceful democratic protests in India.
The Students’ Protest across India
Universities like the Jawaharlal Nehru came out with advisory notices: “In view of directions from the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India regarding public demonstrations, all members are advised to act responsibly and prioritise personal safety. Individuals are requested to refrain from participating in or visiting gatherings at or around Jantar Mantar, New Delhi.”
In Manipur, Home Minister GovindasKonthoujam, addressing a press conference in Imphal on 23 July 2026, alleged that the “Save Manipur” protesters at Jantar Mantar were being used to provoke Manipuri youth, and dismissed the slogan as “Yeh sab dikhawahai.””Manipur will be saved by us, not by those raising slogans at Jantar Mantar,” he said, forgetting that the ruling party is resorting to proxy wars and keeping Manipur under siege.
The Indian Government is afraid. Their cronies are afraid. They are afraid of the minorities, afraid of the students, afraid of the youth who, in their eyes, are the cockroaches, the unwanted parasites. That is why they are using brutal force to suppress democratic protests and movements.
What began in June 2026 as a sit-in at Jantar Mantar, led by a satirical youth outfit calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, alongside student bodies such as the Students’ Federation of India and the All India Students Association, was ostensibly a protest against irregularities in the NEET examination and a demand for the resignation of the Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. Protesters camped at Jantar Mantar for over a month, joined not only by students but by professionals and families with young children. It was, in every sense, a peaceful civic gathering, the kind that a functioning democracy ought to be able to absorb without flinching.
It could not absorb it. Within weeks, the movement’s demands escalated to calling for the resignations of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, and more than a hundred thousand protesters, undeterred by the closure of sixteen metro stations, barricaded roads and jammed internet lines, poured into central Delhi. On 20 July 2026, as protesters attempted to march towards Parliament during the monsoon session, police used baton charges and tear gas against a crowd comprising largely of students and Gen Z demonstrators who had defied orders to disperse. By the time the march ended, at least two hundred people had been injured, with police officers filmed staging evidence, assaulting women and using spiked batons.
I read of a twenty-one-year-old Delhi University student named Sakshi, caught in a crowd crush after police allegedly pushed demonstrators into an already congested space following the use of tear gas. She was carried unconscious to a police vehicle, with protesters alleging that officers were initially reluctant to take her to the hospital, and was later placed on ventilator support in the intensive care unit before being extubated three days later. An eyewitness, present when she was found, said her face had turned blue.
Individual accountability moved just as slowly. Additional DCP Sandeep Lamba was quietly withdrawn from protest duty after a video showing him slapping a woman protester, who stood still and was doing nothing, went viral. The incident came up before the Delhi High Court during a hearing on two public interest litigations alleging excessive force, where senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan named the officer directly: “Let us not be scared to name our thugs in uniform.” The court ordered notices to the Centre, Delhi Police and the NHRC, and CCTV preservation, but listed the matter for September, a slapped woman’s face circulating online long before any bench would examine it under oath.
The protests and the crackdown that answered them did not stay confined to the capital. They spread to Mumbai, Chandigarh, Surat, Patna, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kerala, Lucknow and Kolkata, with Gurdwara Bangla Sahib becoming an unlikely refuge for those fleeing batons and tear gas near Jantar Mantar itself.
Amid the crowd of Gen Z placards and NEET grievances, one figure stood apart. A youth from Sikkim, wearing a red T-shirt embossed at the front with “Save Manipur” and printed with vital statistics of the violence, more than 60,000 displaced and nearly 400 killed over three years, added a different register of dissatisfaction to the gathering, one aimed less at an examination scandal than at a longer, quieter abandonment. When a media personality asked him why he had come, he answered simply, “India is with Manipur.”
I read all this from Imphal, and I confess a strange, unwelcome sense of recognition rather than shock. The chappals left behind at Minuthong in 2001. The pink shirts and yellow phaneks soaked by the water cannon outside Raj Bhavan in 2004. The boy in his uniform beaten until his assailant tired of the exercise. And now, over two decades later, a young woman’s face turning blue in a crowd crush near Jantar Mantar, because the state’s first instinct, when its citizens gather to ask something of it, is still force.
There is a sentence from George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” that I keep returning to this week: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” Every government that meets a peaceful crowd with tear gas is, at bottom, contesting arithmetic. Sixty thousand displaced and nearly four hundred dead get recast as “dikhawa”. A slap caught on camera gets reduced to a transfer order. A young woman on a ventilator becomes a matter to be revisited in September.
This is not a competition of grief. I am not placing Manipur’s dead and Delhi’s injured on a scale to see whose suffering weighs more. What connects Minuthong, Tamphasana, the boy at the traffic island, and Sakshi in the RML Hospital ICU is not geography. It is the reflex of a state that has decided, again and again, that the citizen’s body is the first thing to be disciplined when the citizen’s voice becomes inconvenient, and that national television anchors who spent little time on Manipur’s mothers before Kangla Fort would need a Delhi datemark before the outrage felt permissible. Twenty-five years after the June Uprising, the tear gas canisters have simply found a new capital to gather in.
The chappals at Minuthong are still there, in memory if nowhere else, thousands of them, left behind by mothers who did not stop chanting even as they ran. Twenty-five years later and sixteen hundred miles away, Jantar Mantar left its own version of the same image behind: chappals scattered across the tarmac near Mandi House and Parliament Street, abandoned in the tussle and melee as protesters ran from batons and tear gas, unclaimed footwear once again standing in for a crowd that had been there and then was forced to scatter. Perhaps that is the only inheritance protest leaves behind in this country: not the resignation demanded, not even the reform promised, but the chappals left behind, waiting for the next generation to recognise them as their own.
Some visuals haunt you and stay with you forever. There are three that stay with me.
The first one is the visual of the chappals and sandals, thousands in different shapes, sizes and colours, of the Imas (mothers of Manipur) at Minuthong, who, in an attempt to evade the security forces’ tear gas canisters and mock bombs, and the lathi(baton)charge, left them behind. Yet they did not stop chanting “No Compromise on Manipur’s Integrity” and “Long Live Manipur.” The protest took place in 2001. During the June Uprising of 2001 in Manipur, 24 people lost their lives when security forces opened fire on demonstrators protesting the extension of the NSCN (IM) ceasefire “without territorial limits.” Many others were injured in the clashes.
The second one is the sight of students of the Tamphasana Girls’ Higher Secondary School, hit by the water cannon, was a sharp contrast to their light pink shirts and bright yellow phaneks huddled on the ground against the force of the water.
The third one is the sight of a Manipur University student (boy) in his navy-blue trousers and white shirt, beaten up mercilessly by a Manipur traffic police constable. It was a one-to-one duel at the traffic island, only that the police wielded a baton and the boy was biting the ground, bleeding profusely. None intervened. None stopped. The traffic police stopped only after he was tired.
Both incidents occurred in the month of July 2004, in the aftermath of Thangjam Manorama’s rape and murder by the Assam Rifles. Students were marching towards the Chief Minister’s Bungalow. But they were stopped in front of the Raj Bhavan (currently Lok Bhavan).
A few days later, to be precise, on 15 July 2004, twelve mothers had disrobed themselves in front of Kangla Fort, then the headquarters of the Assam Rifles in Imphal. They held a banner that read: “Indian Army Rape Us,” and shouted slogans condemning the Assam Rifles and the Armed Forces (Special Powers) Act.
The mothers’ nude protest and other recent mob-induced visuals, I am not including them in my list. Today, we are talking about police atrocities and excesses of the security forces against peaceful democratic protests in India.
The Students’ Protest across India
Universities like the Jawaharlal Nehru came out with advisory notices: “In view of directions from the Hon’ble Supreme Court of India regarding public demonstrations, all members are advised to act responsibly and prioritise personal safety. Individuals are requested to refrain from participating in or visiting gatherings at or around Jantar Mantar, New Delhi.”
In Manipur, Home Minister GovindasKonthoujam, addressing a press conference in Imphal on 23 July 2026, alleged that the “Save Manipur” protesters at Jantar Mantar were being used to provoke Manipuri youth, and dismissed the slogan as “Yeh sab dikhawahai.””Manipur will be saved by us, not by those raising slogans at Jantar Mantar,” he said, forgetting that the ruling party is resorting to proxy wars and keeping Manipur under siege.
The Indian Government is afraid. Their cronies are afraid. They are afraid of the minorities, afraid of the students, afraid of the youth who, in their eyes, are the cockroaches, the unwanted parasites. That is why they are using brutal force to suppress democratic protests and movements.
What began in June 2026 as a sit-in at Jantar Mantar, led by a satirical youth outfit calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, alongside student bodies such as the Students’ Federation of India and the All India Students Association, was ostensibly a protest against irregularities in the NEET examination and a demand for the resignation of the Union Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan. Protesters camped at Jantar Mantar for over a month, joined not only by students but by professionals and families with young children. It was, in every sense, a peaceful civic gathering, the kind that a functioning democracy ought to be able to absorb without flinching.
It could not absorb it. Within weeks, the movement’s demands escalated to calling for the resignations of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah, and more than a hundred thousand protesters, undeterred by the closure of sixteen metro stations, barricaded roads and jammed internet lines, poured into central Delhi. On 20 July 2026, as protesters attempted to march towards Parliament during the monsoon session, police used baton charges and tear gas against a crowd comprising largely of students and Gen Z demonstrators who had defied orders to disperse. By the time the march ended, at least two hundred people had been injured, with police officers filmed staging evidence, assaulting women and using spiked batons.
I read of a twenty-one-year-old Delhi University student named Sakshi, caught in a crowd crush after police allegedly pushed demonstrators into an already congested space following the use of tear gas. She was carried unconscious to a police vehicle, with protesters alleging that officers were initially reluctant to take her to the hospital, and was later placed on ventilator support in the intensive care unit before being extubated three days later. An eyewitness, present when she was found, said her face had turned blue.
Individual accountability moved just as slowly. Additional DCP Sandeep Lamba was quietly withdrawn from protest duty after a video showing him slapping a woman protester, who stood still and was doing nothing, went viral. The incident came up before the Delhi High Court during a hearing on two public interest litigations alleging excessive force, where senior advocate Gopal Sankaranarayanan named the officer directly: “Let us not be scared to name our thugs in uniform.” The court ordered notices to the Centre, Delhi Police and the NHRC, and CCTV preservation, but listed the matter for September, a slapped woman’s face circulating online long before any bench would examine it under oath.
The protests and the crackdown that answered them did not stay confined to the capital. They spread to Mumbai, Chandigarh, Surat, Patna, Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Kerala, Lucknow and Kolkata, with Gurdwara Bangla Sahib becoming an unlikely refuge for those fleeing batons and tear gas near Jantar Mantar itself.
Amid the crowd of Gen Z placards and NEET grievances, one figure stood apart. A youth from Sikkim, wearing a red T-shirt embossed at the front with “Save Manipur” and printed with vital statistics of the violence, more than 60,000 displaced and nearly 400 killed over three years, added a different register of dissatisfaction to the gathering, one aimed less at an examination scandal than at a longer, quieter abandonment. When a media personality asked him why he had come, he answered simply, “India is with Manipur.”
I read all this from Imphal, and I confess a strange, unwelcome sense of recognition rather than shock. The chappals left behind at Minuthong in 2001. The pink shirts and yellow phaneks soaked by the water cannon outside Raj Bhavan in 2004. The boy in his uniform beaten until his assailant tired of the exercise. And now, over two decades later, a young woman’s face turning blue in a crowd crush near Jantar Mantar, because the state’s first instinct, when its citizens gather to ask something of it, is still force.
There is a sentence from George Orwell’s “Nineteen Eighty-Four” that I keep returning to this week: “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four.” Every government that meets a peaceful crowd with tear gas is, at bottom, contesting arithmetic. Sixty thousand displaced and nearly four hundred dead get recast as “dikhawa”. A slap caught on camera gets reduced to a transfer order. A young woman on a ventilator becomes a matter to be revisited in September.
This is not a competition of grief. I am not placing Manipur’s dead and Delhi’s injured on a scale to see whose suffering weighs more. What connects Minuthong, Tamphasana, the boy at the traffic island, and Sakshi in the RML Hospital ICU is not geography. It is the reflex of a state that has decided, again and again, that the citizen’s body is the first thing to be disciplined when the citizen’s voice becomes inconvenient, and that national television anchors who spent little time on Manipur’s mothers before Kangla Fort would need a Delhi datemark before the outrage felt permissible. Twenty-five years after the June Uprising, the tear gas canisters have simply found a new capital to gather in.
The chappals at Minuthong are still there, in memory if nowhere else, thousands of them, left behind by mothers who did not stop chanting even as they ran. Twenty-five years later and sixteen hundred miles away, Jantar Mantar left its own version of the same image behind: chappals scattered across the tarmac near Mandi House and Parliament Street, abandoned in the tussle and melee as protesters ran from batons and tear gas, unclaimed footwear once again standing in for a crowd that had been there and then was forced to scatter. Perhaps that is the only inheritance protest leaves behind in this country: not the resignation demanded, not even the reform promised, but the chappals left behind, waiting for the next generation to recognise them as their own.