Discover more

Law textbooks and casebooks South Asia rights Legal writing style guides Legal ethics training programs Human rights documentaries Legal news subscriptions

The Leaflet

“Police’s arrival instigated the mob”: At Delhi’s Palestine solidarity event, chaos, police unaccountability and the wages of India’s corrupted stance on Israel | The Leaflet

Leaflet Reports Freedom Due Process Conflict in West Asia

“Police’s arrival instigated the mob”: At Delhi’s Palestine solidarity event, chaos, police unaccountability and the wages of India’s corrupted stance on Israel

A peaceful pro-Palestine rally at Delhi’s Nehru market was rocked by a hyper-nationalist mob of intruders. As tensions escalated, Delhi police first stood by and watched, and then closed in on the protestors to detain and charge them. One reporter saw it all.

Mouli Sharma

Published on: 26 July 2025, 10:07 am

“Police’s arrival instigated the mob”: At Delhi’s Palestine solidarity event, chaos, police unaccountability and the wages of India’s corrupted stance on Israel

LAST SATURDAY IN NEW DELHI’S NEHRU PLACE MARKET, a peaceful demonstration of Indian citizens' solidarity with Palestine in the ongoing genocide by Israel turned violent as a mob of nearly two hundred people surrounded the group and began attacking them, eventually requiring the police to extract them to avoid a riot or stampede.

The demonstration began at around 12:00 PM, with a hundred or so participants gathered there, holding placards and pamphlets protesting India's supply of arms and labour to the Israel government. But before the public—which had quickly gathered around the demonstration—could even understand what was being protested, an altercation with the police personnel who, according to officers, had arrived there for security, caused the day to take a turn for the worse.

Role of Delhi Police

"We hadn't been informed earlier," an officer from the Kalkaji police station told The Leaflet, citing the lack of prior permission or 'bandobast' as the primary cause for the situation getting out of hand, though the previous year, detentions were carried out at a similar protest despite these permissions.

"If [the protesting activists] had taken official permission, we would have made arrangements for security. We only arrived after we received a call from a local shopkeeper reporting suspicious activity. We can't protect you from a crowd like this without a significant force being deployed," he added.

Members of the assaulted group, however, disagreed.

"It was the police's arrival that instigated the mob in the first place," said Paran Amitava, a researcher of public health and an organiser of the event. "It is possible that if the police hadn't begun interrogating us ,people wouldn't have got so angry and so agitated in the first place," she said, adding that they hadn't even begun to explain why they were there to the public in any way before the police arrived.

“Police’s arrival instigated the mob”: At Delhi’s Palestine solidarity event, chaos, police unaccountability and the wages of India’s corrupted stance on Israel

"Where were you when there was a dispute with Pakistan?" asked a senior constable to a journalist present at the scene. When the journalist responded with India's historical stance on the issue of Palestinian soil, the officer said: "I don't care about Mr. Vajpayee. I only care about my country."

"What they're doing is very wrong," said a few bystanders who chose to stay out of the mob, but still disapproved of the solidarity event. "Israel is our friend. They shouldn't do this."

Trickle down politics

"There was once a time when India stood with Palestine against Israel's brutal occupation," Amitava explained, "The reason [for the changed stance] is really quite simple. The Indian government stands now with [industrialists like] Adani. It is engaged in a massive weapons trade with Israel. The matter is of money."

Over the last decade since the Modi government came to power, India's trade in arms and ammunition with Israel has increased a staggering 33 times from a meagre 5.6 million USD in 2015 to 185 million USD in 2025. Between 2022 and 2023 this figure jumped 120 million USD from 135 to 265 in a single financial year—the same year Israel began its mass killings in occupied Palestine in retaliation for Hamas' October 7 attack.

The change in India's diplomatic relations with the Middle East over the last few years has occurred parallel to a corresponding shift in trade policy. In 1992 under the Narasimha Rao Ministry, during which India opened its Representative Office in Gaza, India's trade with Israel measured at a modest 200 million USD, about a twentieth of the trade with the US. This value has more or less consistent over the last three decades, meaning that every year that India's trade grew with the US, India's trade with Israel followed suit, having expanded to an enormous 6.53 billion USD in 2025.

After being detained in the August protest last year, Dreze and Raja pointed out that the complicity of the Indian government with some public and private companies in the Gaza genocide was no hidden secret, “We have heard of Adani Defence and Aerospace Ltd., but there are other culprits as well – Munitions India and Premier Explosive, in addition to the government itself which has approved not just the provision of militarised cargo to Israel but also the shipment of Indian workers to Israel, a move that puts their lives at risk.”

Over the last year, India's historic foreign policy with Palestine and Israel has shifted drastically away from the anti-colonialist roots of its longstanding view on the conflict.

"The language that they were using, their words and phrases… they were parroting the very things we're bombarded with in the mainstream media like 'send them to Pakistan', 'send them to Bangladesh', 'jis thaali mei khaate hai usi thaali mei chhed karte hai', etc.," said Anjali, commenting on how geopolitical perspectives like Zionism and Hindutva alike trickle down into public consciousness from mainstream news outlets, with the corporate funded news becoming part of the state machinery.

The higher judiciary, too, has to some extent participated in enabling a narrative of discouragement around pro-Palestine protests in India. Nearly a week after the Nehru place protests, when Communist Party of India (Marxist) challenged Mumbai police’s denial of permission for a protest against the ongoing conflict in Gaza, a Bombay HC division bench rapped the organisation: “You are looking at Gaza and Palestine while neglecting what’s happening here. Why don’t you do something for your own country? Look at your own country. Be patriots.”

“Wherever we damn please”

After the dust had settled on July 19 in Nehru Place,police officers made a phone call to the Kalkaji police station to bring in a detention van and women police officers: not for any of the assailants who had snatched and destroyed flags and banners belonging to the solidarity group; not for the mob that broke an elderly woman's wrist brace trying to wrangle a flag from her hand; not for those who hurled abuses at young Muslim women and physically shoved 20 odd people to the edge of the road, but for the protestors themselves.

"Let's do one thing," a senior constable said to another surrounded by the young women who led the group. "Let's just leave them to the mob inside. Let's see what happens. Go back inside, why don't you?"

"The demonstration is over. You told us to put the banners and flags inside, and we have,” said Priyadarshini, a coordinator of the event, after an officer asked her and the others to "get out" of there immediately, unless they wanted to be detained, “Now we are just public standing here." The police were clear that the instructions were only for the protestors; bystanders who had watched and egged on the mob had, unlike them, “the right to be there.”

India's foreign policy on Israel, like all matters and characteristics of state, have trickled down not only into to its citizens but also to the executive machinery of the country, creating a chilling effect where rights like that to peaceful assembly, speech and dissent become ceremonial fictions devoid of meaning.

"Let's do one thing," a senior constable said to another surrounded by the young women who led the group. "Let's just leave them to the mob inside.”