Shaheen Bagh Anti-CAA Protest Case (Amit Sahni v. Commissioner of Police)

In response to the controversial Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and proposed National Register of Citizens (NRC), a largely women-led sit-in protest began at Shaheen Bagh, Delhi, in December 2019. The demonstrators blocked a major arterial road for over 100 days, sparking similar protests across India. Public Interest Litigations were filed in the Supreme Court arguing the blockade caused severe public inconvenience. The case, spearheaded by petitioners Amit Sahni and Nand Kishore Garg against the Delhi Police, examined whether the right to protest could justify the indefinite occupation of public thoroughfares. By the time of the hearing, the protest had already been cleared due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The court delivered its judgment on the limits of protest in October 2020, setting a significant legal precedent for the exercise of democratic rights in public spaces.

The Supreme Court ruled that public roads and spaces cannot be indefinitely occupied for protests, holding that the right to protest must coexist with the public's right to commute freely. The court emphasized that such occupations cannot be permitted to become a "new norm" and that the administration must take action to clear illegal blockades in the future. Since the Shaheen Bagh protest had already been dismantled, no specific clearance order was issued for that site, but the verdict established binding guidelines restricting the manner and location of future demonstrations.

The core dispute centered on the constitutional tension between the right to peaceful protest under Article 19 and the right to free movement under Article 21. The legal question was whether an indefinite sit-in that completely blocks a public road can be considered a reasonable exercise of the fundamental right to assembly and expression, or if it constitutes an unlawful public nuisance that the state must clear to protect the rights of the general public.

The judgment was widely seen as a landmark ruling on the limits of dissent, drawing both praise as a necessary step to prevent anarchy on public streets and criticism from civil liberties advocates who feared it would be used to suppress democratic protests. It emboldened authorities to act swiftly against road-based agitations and sparked a national debate on the shrinking space for peaceful dissent in India, while the Shaheen Bagh sit-in itself became a global symbol of grassroots resistance and female political participation.