Maratha Agitators Flout Court Orders, Police Look The Other Way
By Manu Shrivastava
Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) wore a surreal look last night. Amid the city’s ceaseless clatter of arriving and departing trains, a different sort of immobility took centre stage.
Mumbai’s Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus (CSMT) wore a surreal look last night. Amid the city’s ceaseless clatter of arriving and departing trains, a different sort of immobility took centre stage.
Rows of Maratha agitators sprawled across station floors, fast asleep, in blatant disregard of the Bombay High Court’s September 1st direction that they were not to stay, sleep or linger in Mumbai like the homeless and leave by Tuesday noon.
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| Maratha protestors sleep at CSMT as the police watch on |
The order, passed barely a day earlier, was unequivocal — leave the city by Tuesday noon, return home, and do not encroach upon its public spaces.
Yet, come dusk, on Monday, CST remained a makeshift dormitory, the agitators in full public view, watched not with alarm but with a sort of tacit indulgence by the police who even risk committing contempt.
Far from dispersing the crowd, uniformed men stood sentinel, appearing less like enforcers of the Court’s will and more like reluctant custodians of its breach.
The irony was not lost on commuters, many of whom edged past the sleeping agitators with a mix of irritation and resignation. For them, the city’s heartbeat is in its orderliness, trains that run by the minute, footpaths that must remain clear, rules that keep the chaos barely manageable.
Here, however, the law itself seemed suspended, its authority muffled under the very weight of the protestors’ fatigue.
That the police chose silence over action raises uncomfortable questions about enforcement in India’s financial capital. Is a High Court’s order binding only in the abstract, its implementation negotiable when it collides with the politics of the street?
And if so, what message does that send to citizens whose daily lives depend on compliance with rules far less exalted than those issued from a court bench?
In the end, the spectacle at CST was less about the agitators than about a system that blinked when it should have acted.
In the end, the spectacle at CST was less about the agitators than about a system that blinked when it should have acted.
The Court had spoken. The deadline is hours away. But as the protestors slept on and the police kept watch, Mumbai is left to reckon with an unsettling truth: in the contest between law and politics, it is often the law that quietly folds.
