ONCE bitten, twice shy, goes the adage. But for Muslims in India, the experience has been harsher: beaten black and blue, humiliated, harassed and prosecuted — repeatedly — for exercising the constitutional right to peaceful protest. The protests against the contentious National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) remain fresh in public memory. Shaheen Bagh, North Delhi, Lucknow and several other cities saw sit-ins that began as lawful dissent and ended with FIRs, prolonged incarceration without trial, and a chilling effect that still lingers.
It is against this backdrop of continuous persecution — fictitious penal cases, years of imprisonment without trial, and the selective demolition of homes under the banner of ‘bulldozer justice’ — that the latest call for caution must be read. Ahead of the maiden political rally of the nascent Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) at Jantar Mantar on Saturday (June 6), saner voices, community well-wishers and preachers urged Muslims to stay away from it. Far from being alarmist, the suggestion reflects a hard-earned realism.
In the days leading up to the Delhi demonstration, the appeal spread quickly. WhatsApp groups lit up with forwards. Mosque announcements after Friday prayers carried the same message. Instagram reels and posts on X warned that while a protest may last a few hours, the legal and social fallout can stretch for years. The advice was blunt: do not participate, and do not even go near the protest site, because proximity alone could invite scrutiny if unrest were to break out.
This is not the first time such caution has surfaced. Since the anti-CAA protests and the subsequent Delhi riots investigations, clerics and community figures have increasingly circulated messages asking people to weigh the risks. According to a report in The Times of India, a Delhi University student recounted how his father flatly told him to skip the CJP rally: “Focus on your degree and career. One photograph at the wrong place can derail everything.”
The anxiety is not abstract. After the Shaheen Bagh and the subsequent 2020 North-East Delhi violence, hundreds of young men faced charges ranging from unlawful assembly to conspiracy under UAPA. Many spent months, even years, in jail before getting bail. Families sold land and jewellery to fight cases. Homes in Khargone (Madhya Pradesh), Prayagraj, Bareilly and Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) and other towns were razed after municipal notices that followed communal flare-ups — a pattern critics call ‘bulldozer justice’. In that context, the community’s self-preservation instinct is understandable.
Some posts and religious leaders went further, framing non-participation as wisdom rather than fear. Avoiding risk, they argued, is also a strategy for long-term empowerment through education, business, and civic engagement. Others pushed back, noting that peaceful protest remains a democratic right and that staying away altogether cedes public space. Both views were circulating side by side this week, reflecting a debate that is alive inside the community.
Yet the timing and optics of the CJP’s rally make the case for caution stronger. The CJP is a new outfit with little public track record, announcing its arrival with a high-profile demonstration at Jantar Mantar — a site that guarantees media attention and heavy policing. For a community already under disproportionate surveillance after every protest, the risk-reward calculus tilts sharply. As one widely shared reel put it: “You can raise your voice from your classroom, your office, your mohalla. You don’t have to be at Jantar Mantar to be counted.”
Scepticism is warranted when any political group calls for mass mobilisation, but it is equally warranted when voices inside the community ask for restraint. The latter, however, comes from lived experience. When the cost of dissent has been lengthy stints in prisons, demolished homes, and dossiers that follow young men to job interviews, advising people to step back is not surrender — it is a sound suggestion.
The right to protest is constitutional. So is the right to choose not to protest when the deck feels stacked. For many Muslim families, weighing the CJP rally, that second right is the one they are exercising. And given the recent past, it is hard to argue they are wrong.
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Syed Athar Hasnain Rizvi is a senior journalist. He was associated with the National Herald in New Delhi and the Saudi Gazette in Jeddah. He can be contacted at: sahrizvi35@yahoo.com
