Student protests over exam failures test state accountability and protest rights

The right to peaceful protest in India is constitutionally anchored in Article 19(1)(a) (freedom of speech and expression) and Article 19(1)(b) (right to assemble peaceably and without arms). These are not absolute: Article 19(2) and Article 19(3) permit reasonable restrictions in the interests of sovereignty, public order, and decency. The Supreme Court has consistently held that such restrictions must satisfy a dual test of reasonableness and proportionality — the state cannot invoke public order as a blanket justification to suppress legitimate dissent.

India's tradition of student-led political mobilisation stretches back to the colonial era. The founding of the Indian Association in Calcutta in 1876 by Surendranath Banerjee was itself triggered by a student grievance — the colonial government's reduction of the maximum age for the Indian Civil Service examination from 21 to 19, which effectively excluded young Indians from the highest offices open to them. Banerjee's genius was to reframe an administrative grievance as a constitutional question, producing the first genuinely pan-Indian political mobilisation. The pattern recurred during the Emergency (1975–77), when student unions were suspended and activists detained under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), and in the post-1977 period when that suppressed generation reshaped Indian democratic politics.

The Supreme Court progressively strengthened the constitutional scaffolding for protest rights in Ramlila Maidan Incident v. Home Secretary, Union of India (2012), holding that citizens have a fundamental right to assemble and protest in public spaces, and in Anuradha Bhasin v. Union of India (2020), ruling that state responses — including internet shutdowns — must satisfy the proportionality test. These judgments establish that the least restrictive means principle governs any state action curtailing assembly rights.