India, Oct. 25 -- The two commonest misreadings of the right to protest are mirror images. One treats protest as absolute, owing nothing to anyone outside the crowd. The other treats every crowd as a problem to be managed away. The Constitution indulges neither.

Every right in a democracy presses against another; the law of assembly is the patient art of keeping those forces in balance.

Newton's third law has an unlikely home in the Constitution of India; every action, it insists, meets an equal and opposite reaction, and every right a citizen exercises presses, somewhere, against the right of another citizen standing just beyond the frame-the marcher against the commuter, the loudspeaker against the sleeping neighbour, the sit-in again...