The mercury had dipped to 11 degrees at dusk on January 9 but temperatures were rising across town as word rapidly travelled that protesters who had wanted to march from HRD ministry to Rashtrapati Bhavan “dissatisfied with a consultation with the ministry” were lathicharged and being detained.
Within minutes, a call went out on social media “lawyers needed at Mandir Marg”. Just about an hour before the detentions in Delhi, anti-CAA Kollam activist in Chennai, Gayatri Khandhadhai, was detained around 5.30 pm from Valluvar Kotam. They had been on a silent protest. “Lawyer needed in Chennai”, the simple message online said. Similarly, of the event on Sunday (January 5), 27-year-old lawyer Surya Rajappan said, “I called lawyer friends”. Surya and her friend had triple-locked their front door to keep out a mob yelling and banging on the door to their third-floor apartment in Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar. They were scared out of their wits, Rajappan said, “but my legal brain was working”. Within an hour, she said, there were 15 lawyers on the road outside her flat, unable to enter because her landlord and his son who had been part of the mob had locked the main entrance on the ground floor. The lawyers did not budge.