Protest at Turkman Gate after seven anti-caa agitators were detained
nNEW DELHI: Scores of people, including women and students, assembled at central Delhi’s Turkman Gate Thursday evening and staged a protest against Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), National Register of Citizens (NRC) and Delhi Police after nearly a dozen demonstrators were removed by the police from the site early morning.
On Wednesday night, around 200-300 people, had gathered to protest against the CAA and the NRC. After many of them dispersed towards 2am Thursday, some of the remaining 20-30 protestors who had stayed back, despite the rain, were detained by the police while rest were evicted from the protest site.
“As some agitators took shelter in nearby buildings, the police dragged others into buses and removed them from the venue ,” Mishika Singh, a lawyer associated with the protesters, said. Of the evicted protestors, seven were temporarily detained at Rajender Nagar police station.
After some agitators captured the police action on their phones, videos showing security personnel dragging protestors and putting them inside buses were put on social media with SOS messages alleging that students were picked up and detained. “I was in Khureji last night when I got to know about the protest at Turkman Gate. Several women were protesting here and I rushed to join them,” Sara Javed Chawla, a protestor, said.
By evening, the numbers at the protest site, which was cleared by the police in the morning, began to swell. As the numbers increased, more security personnel were deployed there and iron barricades to ensure that the agitators do not block the roads.
“The protestors did not have police permission and were asked to take their demonstration to authorised sites. They, however, did not pay heeds to our requests, so we had to remove them,” deputy commissioner of police (central), Mandeep Singh Randhawa, said.