Indian public order has no ordinary instrument that separates the individual offender from the crowd he stood in. Until it does, the force meant for one falls on all, and the courts acquit both. Needed a court-anchored rioters' register.When a crowd is confident that the state can see the individual, the crowd will help the state find himOn 1 September the Supreme Court, exercising its power under Article 142, separated two categories of person out of the same crowds. For those against whom nothing but presence was alleged, the cases went. For those alleged to have assaulted policemen or destroyed property, the cases remain. That separation is the whole task of public order law, and it took an extraordinary power to perform it once. The ordinary law performs it rarely, slowly, and long after the event.This is about that missing instrument, and about who pays for its absence.The capability questionIndia polices an enormous volume of assembly: religious processions and festival crowds, farm and trade agitations, job aspirants, sporting events, temple queues. The overwhelming majority end without a single offence. In a small proportion, a few individuals commit serious ones: stone-throwing, arson, assault on police, destruction of public property. The whole capability question in public order, from the district superintendent upward, is whether the state can attach a specific act to a specific person.The answer, on the record, is that it cannot. In 2022 the police charge-sheeted rioting cases at 86.6 per cent, above the 71.3 per cent for offences under the penal code as a whole. Conviction in rioting was 24.9 per cent, against 54 per cent overall, with 5,63,696 cases pending trial. Read those together and the finding is not laziness. The police are naming people in large numbers. They name those who were present, because presence is what a baton charge records, and the court acquits, because presence is not the offence. The state can establish that a riot occurred. It cannot establish who did what within it.Who pays for the gap

That gap has a cost, and it falls on the majority. When the individual offender cannot be identified, the only instrument that reaches him is the one that reaches everyone standing near him. The lawful participant absorbs the force meant for someone else, then absorbs the case as well, and waits years for an acquittal that restores nothing. The offender has an excellent chance of the same acquittal, because the evidence against him is no better than the evidence against the man beside him who did nothing. Imprecision punishes the compliant and protects the culpable. Both halves of that sentence should worry a government.What the research measuredCrowd science has measured this for forty years. Reicher, Stott and their colleagues, working first in British football grounds and then across European tournaments, found that a crowd’s behaviour is shaped by how it is handled. Treat a whole gathering as one threat on account of a few, and those who came with no such intention begin to identify with the few, because that is how they are being treated. The reverse was measured too. At Euro 2004 in Portugal the police in the host cities used a graded approach: low-profile presence, continuous information gathering, and force directed only at identified individuals. Roughly 150,000 England supporters attended, from a following that had produced 965 arrests at the previous tournament. In those cities there was one arrest for a violent offence. The observers recorded ordinary supporters restraining troublemakers themselves. When a crowd is confident that the state can see the individual, the crowd will help the state find him.

I learnt the same at Kandela in 2001, on a highway with a tree felled across it and several thousand farmers behind it. Nobody died on my watch, hundreds were injured, and walking back through the burnt tyres I understood that we had prepared thoroughly for the crowd’s anger and not at all for its composition. Nobody asked me afterwards which men had thrown the first stones. No instrument existed that could have told me. Twenty-five years on, none does.Two models, and the design lessonTwo democracies built one, and the contrast between them is the design lesson. Britain’s is anchored in court. A person convicted of football-related violence can be banned from grounds by a court for three to ten years, and officers who know the risk individuals by face travel with the supporters. At the close of last season 2,439 such orders were in force against roughly forty-six million match attendances. The many enter freely. The few are stopped at the turnstile. Germany’s version was a police-held file, entered without a judicial threshold and kept without a fixed period, and in October 2024 the Federal Constitutional Court struck down its legal basis for those defects; the Bundestag rewrote the statute in June 2025 with a threshold and defined storage periods. The lesson is not that such registers are dangerous. It is that registers without courts are.The instrument, specified

India should build the court-anchored version and give it its plain name: a national rioters’ register. Entry only when a court has framed a charge, or recorded a conviction, for rioting, arson or armed assembly. Never for attendance at any assembly. Any restriction flowing from an entry, exclusion from a venue or a route, only upon conviction, only by order of a magistrate, with the person heard. A date against every name and automatic expungement on acquittal. Every query logged, and the log available to the person named. Its work is ordinary and continuous: attaching the offence to the offender, prosecuting every side of a communal street with equal diligence, noticing when the same individuals appear at disturbances in three districts.None of this can substitute for the evidence that makes a conviction. The Supreme Court directed videography of public disorder in 2009; the missing half is a chain of custody and a forensic cell that can place a face to an act in a form a trial court will accept. A register without that evidentiary spine will fill slowly and prove little.The objection, answeredThe objection will be that any register threatens assembly. Consider what it displaces. The present alternative to identifying the few is suspecting the many, and the many are farmers, pilgrims, aspirants and worshippers, the ordinary public whose lawful gatherings a state has a duty to bring home safely. A register with a court at its gate is not a restriction on assembly. It is the operational form of the presumption of innocence for everyone who came and did nothing. That protection should not depend on an extraordinary order once a year. It should be in the law, every day, inevery district.

( DAILY WORLD )