Three protesters were hit by pellets while marching toward Parliament. Weeks later, the chief of the very force that fired those pellets told her own personnel, in a closed-door review, that the level of force used that day did not meet the force's own training standards. That is not an outside allegation. That is the institution indicting itself.

The Institution That Indicted Itself

THE SITUATION

Imagine you are Inspector General Seema Dhundhia. Your force just policed a large, tense march toward Parliament. Three people came away with pellet injuries. Nobody outside is accusing you of anything yet - no court case, no media exposé, no parliamentary question forcing your hand.

You called the review yourself. And what you found is not a rogue officer or a single bad call. It is a pattern: personnel deployed without proper briefing, some without helmets or body protectors, some fresh off Jammu and Kashmir postings with zero conversion training for handling a civilian crowd of students rather than an armed insurgency.

THE COMPETING OBLIGATIONS - NAMED PLAINLY

Obligation one: control a large, at-times-volatile march before it turns into a stampede, a breach of Parliament's security perimeter or a threat to your own personnel's safety. That duty is real. A crowd surging toward a legislature is not a hypothetical risk.

Obligation two: ensure that force against a substantially peaceful protest - one made up largely of students exercising a constitutional right - is proportionate, well-briefed and rights-respecting. That duty is equally real and the Supreme Court has already said so in Anita Thakur vs Govt. of J&K (2016), holding that disproportionate force against peaceful protesters violates Article 19(1)(a) and (b).

The hard part is that both obligations point in different directions at the exact same moment, on the ground, with a company commander who has seconds to decide whether to escalate.

WHY THIS ISN'T A CLEAN CASE

The easy version of this story would frame the RAF as villains who fired on students for no reason. That isn't what the review found. It found a systems failure: personnel trained for counter-insurgency, thrown into public-order duty without retraining, under time pressure, without proper briefing on the actual crowd-control doctrine - the graded ladder of warnings, barriers, tear gas, lathi charge and only then kinetic force.

The gradient exists precisely so that no single officer has to improvise proportionality under stress. When the system skips the training and briefing steps, it hands an impossible judgment call to someone who was never equipped to make it well.

WHAT THIS DEMANDS OF THE STATE

Proportionality cannot be treated as a virtue individual officers must summon in the moment. It has to be built in advance - through mandatory conversion training before redeployment, through briefings that are actually delivered rather than assumed, through commanders who are held to account for readiness, not just outcomes.

Dhundhia's decision to restrict certain weapons pending reform and to bar recently-transferred J&K personnel from immediate crowd duty, is the institution trying to close that gap after the fact. The uncomfortable truth: the state's duty to keep order and its duty to use minimum force are not actually in permanent tension.

They diverge only when the state under-invests in training, briefing and doctrine - and then asks individuals to absorb that failure in real time.