When Justice for One Protester Depends on Who They Are, Not What They Did

One Order, Two Kinds of Protester

The specific problem with Tuesday's order is not that it happened - quashing FIRs against peacefully protesting NEET students was the right call. The problem is that the same state which found it easy to close that chapter in a single stroke has spent years letting near-identical cases against farmers and CAA protesters crawl through court one file at a time.

The Case for Reading

This as Ordinary Legal Process Not every difference in outcome is evidence of bias. NEET protesters' cases may have shared common facts, a single police crackdown and a clean evidentiary record that made a single omnibus order legally straightforward.

Farmers' and CAA protesters' cases, spread across years, multiple states and different specific charges - including the more serious National Security Act - may simply not lend themselves to the same one-shot resolution.

Courts quash cases individually because facts differ individually; treating disparate case timelines as proof of discrimination risks flattening real legal complexity into a simple morality tale.

The Case for Reading

This as Selective Mercy But that explanation strains against the pattern. It was the government - at the Centre and in the states - that petitioned the Court to quash the NEET FIRs as a batch. No equivalent petition has come for the farmers' protesters or the CAA demonstrators, whose cases have instead depended on individual bail applications, individual bench decisions and individual arguments about "lack of specific evidence" fought one case at a time.

The UP government did not merely delay resolving CAA-related cases - it actively escalated them, publicly naming and shaming the accused on hoardings until the courts intervened. That is not the neutral slowness of an overburdened legal system; it is a demonstrated willingness to use the legal process itself as punishment against protesters the state was less inclined to forgive.

Where This Actually Leaves Us

The quashing of the NEET FIRs was correct. The manner of the quashing was not. What should trouble every reader is not that students got relief - it is that relief arrived instantly for one group and has arrived, if at all, in slow, contested fragments for others facing structurally similar charges for structurally similar conduct: peaceful assembly against state action.

A government that can identify, in one sweep, every case worth closing for one set of protesters has demonstrated it possesses the administrative capacity to do the same for others - it has simply chosen not to. Until that capacity is applied by a consistent, publicly stated standard - not by whether a protester is politically convenient to forgive - every future act of state "mercy" toward dissent will read exactly as this one does: relief as a reward for being the right kind of protester, not a right restored to all who exercised it.