The Supreme Court’s decision to quash FIRs against students who participated in protests over the NEET examination controversy is, on the face of it, a compassionate and welcome intervention. No young person who merely exercised the democratic right to protest peacefully should have his or her academic future permanently damaged by a criminal case arising out of an agitation. The Narendra Modi-led NDA Government also deserves credit for accepting the larger humanitarian principle and approaching the Supreme Court for relief rather than allowing the issue to become another political confrontation.
But compassion cannot become a precedent for impunity.
That is where the Supreme Court’s important caveat assumes enormous significance. The Court has not granted a blanket amnesty to everybody who happened to be present at the protests or happened to call himself a student. Its protection was specifically circumscribed. Persons with serious criminal antecedents, particularly those involved in grave and heinous offences, were kept outside the protective umbrella. Indeed, Delhi Police has been permitted to pursue the case against 2,873 individuals identified as having serious criminal antecedents.
This distinction must not be lost in the political celebration surrounding the verdict.
The Court had already made the position clear in its earlier directions: the authorities could proceed against those with criminal antecedents, while protection from coercive action was not available to such persons. It subsequently clarified that “criminal antecedents” meant grave and heinous offences.
That is the crucial rider—and it deserves far greater public attention than the chest-thumping claims of political victory.
The danger is obvious. If this judgment is selectively presented as a declaration that FIRs arising from student protests will automatically disappear, political parties that have failed to win public confidence at the ballot box could be tempted to manufacture street movements and mobilise impressionable students as political foot soldiers. A student banner, after all, cannot become a legal shield. Nor can enrolment in an educational institution erase a criminal record or immunise an individual from prosecution for grave offences.
Democracy certainly gives citizens the right to assemble and express dissent. But democracy does not confer the right to assault police personnel, destroy public property, indulge in violence or commit serious criminal offences. Peaceful protest and criminal conduct are not interchangeable—and the Supreme Court itself has recognised that distinction.
There is another important safeguard that must be underlined: the Court has stated that its September 1 order was passed in the peculiar facts and circumstances of the case and shall not be treated as a precedent. That should effectively answer any attempt to convert this exceptional exercise of Article 142 into a permanent formula for securing immunity from prosecution.
The Government and law-enforcement agencies, therefore, must implement the judgment with precision—not politically, selectively or mechanically. Genuine student protesters who committed no grave offence should certainly be spared the disproportionate consequences of criminal proceedings. But individuals with established serious criminal antecedents, or those accused of grave offences, must continue to face the law. The Supreme Court’s order itself preserves that distinction.
This is not merely a legal technicality. It is the line separating compassion from capitulation and dissent from disorder.
The Court has protected the future of bona fide students. It has not protected criminality masquerading as student activism.
That distinction must be loudly and repeatedly stated, lest political opportunists deliberately blur it. Otherwise, what was intended as a healing intervention for genuinely aggrieved students could be misread as a Pandora’s box—one that future agitators may attempt to open whenever political mobilisation becomes more convenient than electoral accountability.
The right to protest is sacred in a democracy. The right to escape the consequences of serious crime is not.
