The Tiranga trap: Protest, public order and political pressure
The flag as a tactical shield
There is a clever tactic unfolding in the streets of Delhi.
Carry the Tiranga, stage a protest with a large gathering in a place where permission has been denied, or the site has been denotified as a protest venue, and then watch the script play out.
If the police intervene, the cry goes up: the government is stopping citizens from holding the national flag.
If the police hold back, the gathering continues, public inconvenience mounts, and the organisers claim a moral street victory over the government, having effectively sidestepped the ordinary requirement of seeking permission for assemblies in sensitive or crowded areas.
This is not abstract.
The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) used prolonged sit-ins at Jantar Mantar earlier this year to force the resignation of the Education Minister over the NEET paper-leak controversy.
That agitation lasted weeks and extracted concessions.
More recently, the new demand is for the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) and the 2 Election Commissioners (ECs), even as the Supreme Court (SC) is seized by petitions for the same.
CJP leaders and supporters have again entered restricted spaces while displaying the tricolour.
When detained for trespassing or violating prohibitory orders, the response from the organisers and some political voices has been predictable: “Has hoisting the National Flag become unlawful?” “Is waving our own flag in our own country a crime?”
The flag does not suspend the law
The national flag is not a get-out-of-jail-free card.
The Constitution protects the right to peaceful assembly and free expression. Those rights are real and important.
They are also subject to reasonable restrictions in the interest of public order.
Courts have repeatedly made this clear. The SC, in the Shaheen Bagh case, emphasised that protests cannot indefinitely occupy public spaces and inconvenience others; designated sites and time limits matter.
Delhi’s rules ordinarily require prior permission for gatherings at places like Jantar Mantar, and authorities can issue preventive orders when there is an apprehended threat to public tranquillity.
Disobeying a lawful prohibitory order is itself an offence. Those who disagree should have this challenged in the courts and get this law repealed.
Displaying the tiranga is protected and encouraged under the Flag Code. It is an act of patriotism for millions of Indians every day.
But the flag does not suspend every other law.
Carrying it while climbing over barricades into a denotified site, or while assembling without permission in a manner that risks prolonged disruption, does not magically convert an unauthorised gathering into a constitutionally privileged one.
The offence, if any, is the trespass, the violation of the prohibitory order, or the obstruction, not the tiranga in the hand.
Regime change by street, not by ballot
There is a deeper problem that courts and the public should not ignore.
The objective being openly articulated is not merely the resignation of a few officials and reform of a specific policy or institution.
It is ‘regime change’ through sustained street pressure by a few thousand (or even by a few lakh) protesters in a country of almost 100 crore voters who duly elected the present government through the ballot box.
At a press conference on 15 October 2026, senior advocate Prashant Bhushan, appearing alongside CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and other activists, stated clearly: “Yes, we all want regime change… Regime change is the democratic right of every citizen.”
Student leaders associated with the Congress Party have invoked the Bangladesh model of street agitation that toppled an elected government.
When the stated goal is to overturn an elected regime through continuous occupation of public spaces and defiance of regulatory orders, rather than through the next election, the character of the protest changes.
It ceases to be ordinary dissent and becomes an attempt to substitute minority street power for majority electoral mandate.
Doesn’t the majority voice in the elections matter?
Courts should take these stated objectives into account.
Extreme liberalism toward repeated, deliberate violations of prohibitory orders and location restrictions, especially when the organisers themselves frame the agitation as a vehicle for regime change, risks legitimising a form of politics that bypasses the electorate.
Democracy requires space for protest; it also requires that the verdict of hundreds of millions of voters not be overturned by the sustained disruption of a far smaller number.
The logical extreme
Push the logic to its extreme, as the tactic invites us to do.
Suppose a group walks into a bank waving the tiranga and begins emptying the vaults.
Should the police stand aside because intervening would be ‘stopping citizens from carrying the national flag’?
Doesn’t it sound ridiculous?
The same principle applies, scaled down, to unauthorised large-scale occupations of public spaces that inconvenience residents, block roads, or risk escalating into indefinite standoffs aimed at forcing political outcomes the ballot box has not delivered.
The flag is not a licence for lawlessness.
Treating it as one cheapens both the symbol and the genuine right to dissent.
Drawing the red line
A democracy must protect the space for protest.
It must also protect the ordinary functioning of public life and the ability of authorities to regulate assemblies so that one group’s expression does not trample everyone else’s rights or nullify the electoral choice of the much larger citizenry.
When permission processes become arbitrary or when designated sites are eliminated without genuine alternatives, courts can and should scrutinise that.
But the reverse is equally true: when organisers deliberately choose confrontation at restricted locations, wrap the confrontation in the national flag, and simultaneously declare that the real goal is regime change, the public conversation becomes distorted.
The debate shifts from whether the gathering complied with reasonable rules to whether anyone is ‘anti-national’ for enforcing those rules.
The tiranga belongs to every Indian. It is not the private property of any protest movement.
Using it as a tactical shield against the ordinary requirements of public order, while openly pursuing extra-electoral regime change, does not strengthen patriotism; it risks turning a shared national symbol into a partisan prop.
Citizens have every right to demand accountability, reform examination systems, or question electoral processes.
They do not have the right to demand that the rules of assembly simply evaporate the moment the flag is held in hand, nor to insist that a few thousand people on the street can override the mandate of a vastly larger electorate.
If the people and the courts treat the presence of the tiranga as an automatic exemption from permission requirements and location restrictions, the next logical step is the bank.
Better to draw the line clearly now: the flag is sacred; the law still applies; and the will of the voters expressed through elections remains the foundation of democratic legitimacy.
It is worth filing a case in the SC against the vulgarization of the Tiranga.
Note:
1. Text in Blue points to additional data on the topic.
2. The views expressed here are those of the author and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of PGurus.
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