The Delhi Lt-Governor also gave clear instructions to the police chief to take other steps to ensure that law and order is firmly under control at the protest site.
In the backdrop of the forthcoming Delhi assembly elections, Delhi Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal has directed Police Commissioner Amulya Patnaik to ensure outsiders and suspicious characters are thoroughly frisked before they can access the Shaheen Bagh protest side. Baijal’s clear directive comes against the backdrop of a shooting incident just 50 metres from the stage earlier in the day.
Lieutenant Governor of Delhi Anil Baijal (Sonu Mehta/HT File Photo)
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The Delhi Lt-Governor also gave clear instructions to the police chief to take other steps to ensure that law and order is firmly under control at the protest site.
Baijal’s instructions, Delhi Police sources said, were designed to prevent any repetition of the unsavoury shooting incidents.
The two incidents of firing come just days before the national capital is to vote on February 8, heightening the sensitivities around the protest and the possibility that any incident at Shaheen Bagh was bound to be amplified by rival sides.
Baijal is learnt to have spoken with Patnaik soon after a young man fired shots in the air on Saturday evening. He was immediately taken into custody. Sources said Baijal had suggested that the police extensively put up barricades around the protest site to enable cops to control access and frisk outsiders.
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Saturday’s incident of a young man firing in the air was the second time in three days that a firearm has been fired at the protest side.
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Saturday’s incident of a young man firing in the air was the second time in three days that a firearm has been fired at the protest side.
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On Thursday, a teenager from Jewar in Uttar Pradesh had turned up at the protest site with a country-made pistol. He opened fire at the crowd, injuring a second-year postgraduate student.
The protest at Shaheen Bagh against the amended citizenship law started last month after Parliament enacted a law that empowers the government to fast-track citizenship requests from refugees belonging to the religious minorities from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan.
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.
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