We, the people of India are committed to the Constitutionalism and to the rule of law. In recent times, there have been occurrences of many violent protests in the form of demonstrations, processions and call for ‘bandh’ etc. for certain cause, by means of blockade of public roads, railways and causing destruction to the public property. Such protests are being done against the laws enacted by the Parliament, like the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA) and the Farmers’ Acts, 2020. The aforesaid, unlawful demonstrations, processions and call for ‘bandh’ etc. in exercise of the supposed implied right to protest, under Article 19 (1) (a) & (b) of the Constitution, are abuse of right to protest and interference with the fundamental rights of the citizens. We have fundamental right to protest by peaceful means, but such right is subject to reasonable restrictions and it should be exercised in good faith, by taking care of the fundamental rights of the others. In this paper there is an endevour to examine the compelling reasons and justifications before the State to enact the “CAA” and the Farmers’ Acts, 2020; the scope of the right to protest and its abuse; and its effect on fundamental rights of the citizens.
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits remixing, adapting, and building upon the work for non-commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited.