'Institutional risk-aversion in policing often persists irrespective of the ruling political dispensation.' Comment.

Risk-averse policing is the bureaucratic preference for prohibiting an event over facilitating it, so that no disorder can be traced to the officer on duty. Evidence from India's protest regulation suggests this reflex is institutional rather than partisan, though political intent aggravates it.

The pattern outlasts governments

• Bengaluru's Licensing and Regulation of Protests, Demonstrations and Protest Marches (Bengaluru City) Order, 2021, issued under the Karnataka Police Act, confines all protests in the city to Freedom Park; the High Court directed the State to enforce it in letter and spirit [1]. Successive dispensations of different parties have retained and applied it identically.
• Permission has been routinely refused for peaceful assemblies, and police have registered cases against demonstrators — several later set aside by courts, indicating that caution, not law, drove the action.
• An informal expectation that even indoor meetings be "informed" to the local police shows overreach beyond the statute, a habit no election changes.

Why the reflex is structural

• The superintendence of the political executive over police, retained from the colonial framework, is chronically misused; the Second ARC (2007) recorded such interference in decision-making [2].
• Career incentives are asymmetric: an officer is penalised for disorder, never rewarded for enabling dissent. The Prakash Singh v. Union of India (2006) directives — State Security Commission, fixed two-year tenures, Police Complaints Authority — remain patchily implemented, leaving no insulation [3].
• Judicial doctrine supplies a ready shield: Amit Sahni v. Commissioner of Police (2020) held that dissent must occur at designated places [4], which police read as licence to zone protest out of public view.

Where politics still matters Selective severity in politically sensitive cases, and the failure to rescind an executive order that any government could withdraw, show that partisan choice shapes the intensity of restriction even if not its origin.

Institutional risk-aversion is thus the base condition, politics the multiplier. Completing the Prakash Singh reforms, adopting a facilitative "prior-notice" model instead of licensing, and training police to see assembly as a right to be enabled would align policing with Article 19(1)(b) — treating the citizen's protest as a duty of the State to protect, not a risk to be managed.