A Year After Leh: Who Answers for the Order to Fire?

The Order and the Answer: Two Duties the State Cannot Separate Picture the

officer on the ground in Leh on September 24, 2025. A protest has turned violent. Property is burning and the crowd is not dispersing. Every minute of restraint risks more damage and more injuries, possibly to the police as well.

Every round of live fire risks a death that can never be undone. Four people died that day. The easy answer would be to call the firing either plainly necessary or plainly excessive. The honest answer is that nobody outside that command chain yet knows which and that is what makes this a live ethics question a year later.

The First Duty: Order

The state's duty to stop violence is real, not a pretext. An officer who holds fire while a mob attacks people or public buildings is also failing someone: the people inside those buildings and the officers in the line. Refusing to use force at all is not automatically the ethical choice.

What ethics asks is narrower. Force should be the last resort, it should be graded and it should stop at the minimum needed. Wangchuk's questions go to exactly this: were the prescribed stages of crowd control exhausted before live ammunition was used and why were people hit in vital parts of the body?

He is not claiming the state had no right to act. He is asking whether it acted within the limits of that right.

The Second Duty: Answerability This is

where a year matters. The Justice B.S. Chauhan inquiry exists because the state itself accepted that the firing needed an independent account. An inquiry whose findings stay unpublished leaves that obligation half met. The families were given Rs 15 lakh each, but money cannot stand in for an explanation.

Wangchuk has pressed for parity with the Rs 1 crore he says was assured to families affected by the NEET paper leak. Whatever one makes of that comparison, it shows the grievance underneath: without published findings, compensation feels like a price set in the dark.

The same logic applies to the prosecutions. According to his statement, 87 people were named as accused, 81 were arrested and withdrawal has been approved for 20. His demand is not a blanket amnesty. He accepts that people with credible evidence of violence against them should face the law and asks that cases against those who were only present or who tried to calm the crowd, be reviewed.

On his own six-month NSA detention, his stated grievance is simple: if he was such a danger to public order, why is he free now and if he was not, who answers for the six months?

The Resolution

These two duties are not rivals to be traded against each other. They are one duty seen from two points in time. A state earns the authority to use force in the moment by showing, afterwards, how that force was used. The right course now is to publish the Chauhan report, with narrow redactions only where individual safety requires them.

After that, compensation should follow a stated, principled formula and each remaining case should be reviewed on its own evidence. Publishing the report has a real cost: it may embarrass the force and harden positions in the ongoing talks on Ladakh's future.

Keeping it back costs something harder to rebuild, which is the belief that extraordinary power comes with an obligation to explain itself.