Discuss the constitutional and administrative challenges in fixing accountability for police excesses during protests in Union Territories like Delhi.

The Supreme Court's constitution of a high-powered enquiry committee, and its quashing of FIRs against NEET-UG protesters after the July 2026 Delhi crackdown, has revived the question of who answers for force used against citizens exercising Article 19(1)(b) freedoms [1][5]. In Union Territories, that question is complicated by a divided constitutional design.

Constitutional challenges

• Assembly without police powers: Article 239AA excludes public order, police and land from Delhi's legislative and executive competence, so an elected Assembly cannot summon or discipline the force policing its voters [1].
• Accountability flows to the Centre: superintendence rests with the Union Home Ministry, making legislative scrutiny remote from the affected population — the plea therefore seeks liability at the level of senior officers and the MHA itself [1][5].
• Balancing rights and order: the reasonable-restrictions test under Article 19(3) leaves proportionality of lathis, tear gas or pellet guns to be judged case-by-case, with no codified statutory standard [1].
• Judicialised remedy: relief comes chiefly through writ jurisdiction and court-appointed committees rather than routine institutional mechanisms [5].

Administrative challenges

• Blurred command chains: joint deployment of local police with central armed forces makes it hard to attribute a specific act to a specific authority.
• Weak complaint machinery: the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Home Affairs urged that Police Complaints Authorities function outside the police force, with retired judges and civil servants — a standard many of the 31 states/UTs meet only formally [3].
• Diluted reforms: the Prakash Singh directives on security commissions and complaints authorities remain unevenly implemented, while ministerial control is misused [2].
• Evidence in the accused's custody: CCTV, drone and body-camera footage is held by the very force under scrutiny, hence judicial directions to preserve it [5].
• Capacity deficits: large vacancies and thin crowd-control training push forces toward blunt responses [3].

Accountability here fails less from absent law than from fragmented authority. Institutionalising independent complaints authorities, mandatory audio-visual documentation of crowd control and a statutory proportionality protocol — as the Second ARC's Public Order report urged — would make oversight routine rather than exceptional, aligning policing with the constitutional promise of peaceful assembly [4].