In the summer of 1866, the Reform League, a movement campaigning to extend the vote to working men, called a meeting in Hyde Park, central London. That meeting, scheduled for July 23, had been barred, and the park's gates were locked. Part of the crowd, according to an account in the book Defining the Victorian Nation, broke down the railings and a few fought the police.
A 2019 paper in the journal Historical Geography argued that the protest for the vote, in effect, became a public argument over who could use the park and for what purpose.
Six years after that 1866 protest, the UK Parliament passed the Parks Regulation Act 1872. The north-eastern corner of the park, near Marble Arch and Oxford Street, called Speakers' Corner, went on to become a byword for open-air free speech, and governments far from London have since borrowed its name.
On Monday, October 12, Delhi Police de-notified Jantar Mantar in central Delhi as a designated protest venue, instead naming Ramlila Ground, Burari Ground and CBD Ground in Shahdara as the new sites. For 33 years before that, a short stretch of road beside the 18th-century observatory had been the capital's main address for dissent.
The move revives an old argument over who decides where citizens may protest, and how far from the seat of power they may do it. The practice of governments designating places for protest is older than Jantar Mantar and beyond India. Some governments have used such sites to make room for dissent and others to keep it in check. Judges, the United Nations and scholars have argued over the difference for decades.
{{/usCountry}}The move revives an old argument over who decides where citizens may protest, and how far from the seat of power they may do it. The practice of governments designating places for protest is older than Jantar Mantar and beyond India. Some governments have used such sites to make room for dissent and others to keep it in check. Judges, the United Nations and scholars have argued over the difference for decades.
{{/usCountry}}Also read: How Jantar Mantar’s place in Delhi’s protest map changed
What a designated site is
A 2023 paper in The Journal of Indian and Asian Studies gave a working definition of how a protest site becomes a designated one. Its author, Harleen Kaur, then a doctoral researcher at the National University of Singapore and King's College London, wrote that this happens "not only by people's claim to a piece of land but by government recognition".
In her view, that recognition does two jobs at once. It accepts protesters as part of democratic space, and it also lets the State contain them in places that can be policed and controlled through guidelines.
A 2005 paper by geographers Don Mitchell and Lynn Staeheli, built on a study of protest permits in Washington DC, argued that such systems had evolved across North America and Western Europe into a bureaucratic means to shape, and in some cases directly control, public dissent. A corner with rules
The popular story holds that the 1872 Act set aside a zone where anyone could say anything. But Speakers' Corner is not mentioned in the Act. One of the regulations in its schedule, in fact, barred anyone from delivering any public address in a park except in accordance with the park's rules.
The corner's legal footing as a zone of free speech today comes from regulations the UK government issued in 1997 under powers granted by Parliament. Unless the government has given written permission, they ban public speeches across the royal parks except in "the public speaking area in Hyde Park". One of the world's best-known free-speech spots is, in law, a zone drawn by the state.
The phrase Speakers' Corner never found much use in India, but the concept did. The closest equivalent is the dharna sthal, a site set aside for sit-ins and demonstrations, and several state capitals have one. Mumbai's protesters gather at Azad Maidan, Bengaluru turned the grounds of its old central jail into Freedom Park for the purpose, and Hyderabad's Dharna Chowk at Indira Park was shut by the police and later reopened on court orders. Jantar Mantar became the national version, a place where people from across the country came to be heard within reach of Parliament.
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How the idea travelled
The idea of Speakers' Corner has been imitated far and wide, but the imitations have served different ends. The examples abroad fall along a spectrum. At one end, democracies have drawn temporary zones around specific events for security, and at the other, designated sites have worked mainly as a means of control.
In the US, Boston drew a high-security zone around the venue of the 2004 Democratic National Convention, with the Secret Service in principal charge, and set a "designated demonstration zone" at its edge. Protest groups challenged the arrangement, but the federal appeals court in Boston declined to block it in Bl(a)ck Tea Society v City of Boston.
Singapore opened its own Speakers' Corner in Hong Lim Park on September 1, 2000, modelled on the one in Hyde Park, according to the country's National Heritage Board. It became the only venue where citizens could speak in public without a licence. Singapore's first legal outdoor demonstration took place there in 2008. In a country where public speaking had required a licence, the corner widened a narrow opening.
Records from China and Russia point the other way. Before the 2008 Olympics, China designated three Beijing parks as protest zones. Officials received 77 applications and approved none, Time magazine reported, citing the state news agency Xinhua. Two women in their late seventies, who had repeatedly applied to protest over compensation for homes seized for redevelopment, were sentenced to a year of "re-education through labour", The New York Times reported in August 2008. Applying to use a designated zone, in their case, led to punishment. A human rights group later recorded that the sentence had been rescinded.
Russia amended its assembly law in 2012 to allow specially designated areas for public assemblies, popularly known as "Hyde Parks". Amnesty International reported in 2014 that these were typically remote parks with few, if any, passers-by.
Over time, such spaces in the West, too, have come to be seen as under threat. John Parkinson, a political theorist, argued in Democracy and Public Space (Oxford University Press, 2012) that democracy requires physical public space, and that some of the most valuable kinds of such spaces were under attack in developed democracies.
Britain once tried designating an area where protest was restricted. Its Serious Organised Crime and Police Act 2005 required anyone demonstrating in a zone around Parliament, even alone, to give the police written notice, normally six days ahead, and to obtain their authorisation, until Parliament repealed those sections in 2011.
Also read: Jantar Mantar gone, Delhi's 3 new protest sites come with cost, booking, distance woes
The case against confinement
Philosophers who defend protest tend to stress place. Hannah Arendt wrote in The Human Condition (1958) that "the space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action", and that this space vanishes once people disperse.
The American philosopher Judith Butler, building on Arendt in Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard University Press, 2015), argued that an assembly "is already speaking before it utters any words". On that view, where a crowd gathers is part of what it says.
The case for designation
American courts that uphold designated sites typically start from public order. Cox v New Hampshire (1941) shows both sides of the argument. The US Supreme Court recognised the discussion of public questions as "immemorially associated with resort to public places", yet upheld a state law requiring licences for parades and processions on public streets.
Writing for a unanimous court, Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes said: "Civil liberties, as guaranteed by the Constitution, imply the existence of an organized society maintaining public order without which liberty itself would be lost in the excesses of unrestrained abuses."
Nearly five decades later, in a case over noise rules for concerts in New York's Central Park, Ward v Rock Against Racism (1989), Justice Anthony Kennedy restated the test American courts now apply. Governments may limit the time, place and manner of speech if the limits are content-neutral, narrowly tailored to a significant interest, and leave open "ample alternative channels" for the message. Boston's convention zone survived its legal challenge on that test.
What Indian courts have said
India's Supreme Court has ruled on the question several times, and on both sides of it. In Himat Lal K Shah v Commissioner of Police (1972), it struck down an Ahmedabad police rule that gave officers unguided power to refuse permission for public meetings on streets. In 2018, it held that the National Green Tribunal's blanket ban on protests at Jantar Mantar went too far, and directed Delhi Police to frame guidelines for its use.
In the Shaheen Bagh case of October 2020, a three-judge bench held that "democracy and dissent go hand in hand, but then the demonstrations expressing dissent have to be in designated places alone". It made that observation in a case it said involved the blockage of a public way, which it treated as a step beyond a protest in an undesignated area.
In Delhi
On November 7, 1966, a demonstration near Parliament House demanding a nationwide ban on cow slaughter ended in arson and police firing. Three days later, the government told the Rajya Sabha that eight people had died and that processions and meetings had been banned.
Kaur argued in her 2023 paper that the police of the period had no guidelines suited to a post-independence capital. Prohibition orders around Parliament, she wrote, pushed demonstrations to the Boat Club lawns near Parliament House, along what was then Rajpath.
After a week-long farmers' protest at the Boat Club in 1988, protests there were restricted, and from 1993, the road beside Jantar Mantar became the designated site. The three grounds named on Monday are farther from Parliament: Ramlila Ground is about 4km by road from Jantar Mantar, CBD Ground more than 12km, and Burari Ground about 18km.