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For 34 days, students sat at Jantar Mantar – braving humid nights, thinning rations, and the particular fatigue of being young and simply asking your government to tell the truth. What finally ended the sit-in was not an admission or an answer. It was attrition, five weeks of wearing people down, followed by a resignation that let everyone else exhale and move on. What remained, however, as the tents came down, is a quieter and more damning story. It showed how little institutional weight stood behind these students when it mattered most, and how much of it they had to build themselves, march by march, slogan by slogan, while much of the country was told there was nothing to see.

The police’s use of lathis and pellet guns

Let’s begin with what is no longer seriously in dispute. Delhi Police used lathis – some allegedly fitted with nails – to break up a march. The claim that no pellet guns were fired, made more than once on the floor of Parliament, does not survive the paper trail. A general diary entry at the Parliament Street police station recorded that the Rapid Action Force (RAF) fired anti-riot guns and plastic pellets on a DCP’s instruction; a medico-legal report corroborated pellet wounds in at least one protester.

A senior counsel before the Supreme Court went further, arguing that what doctors pulled from injured bodies were not standard rubber rounds but harder, metallic projectiles capable of the organ-deep damage pellet munitions are known to inflict. One young man is reported to be carrying roughly 200 pellets in his body, some close enough to the heart to worry his surgeons, with a real risk of losing his sight – a boy who went to a protest and may spend a lifetime living with the consequences of someone else’s order.

Two officers linked to the operation have been quietly reshuffled; an internal inquiry drags on even as the force’s account keeps shifting. Strip away the argument over munition classification and one fact remains: a peaceful, constitutionally protected assembly  met with force built to blind and maim, and the state’s first reflex was to deny it happened, not........

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