# Press release **FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: 21 August 2026** Contact: evidence@whogavetheorder.in ยท corrections@whogavetheorder.in Site: https://www.whogavetheorder.in --- ## A public archive asks one question about police use of force in India: who gave the order? **WhoGaveTheOrder.in is open. It records police use of force against students in India and tries to establish who authorised it. So far, for none of the four incidents it holds has any order authorising force been produced.** 21 August 2026: A public archive at whogavetheorder.in sets out what is documented about recent police action against student protesters in India, what is only reported, and what nobody has yet been able to establish. The archive is built on one rule: nothing appears on it as a fact without a source attached. Where no document exists, the page says so and leaves the space empty. Every claim carries a label: verified, corroborated, reported, disputed, unverified, unknown. Each label has a published definition that the site applies to itself. It also keeps two things apart that are usually run together. That an office had the **authority** to order police action is a statement about law and administrative structure. That a particular office **did** order a particular action is a statement that needs a document. The archive maps eight offices with authority over the incidents it covers. It names none of them as having given an order, because no order has been found. ### What the archive holds today * **Four incidents.** Police action at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on 20 and 22 July 2026; police action in Bihar at Patna on 22 and 25 July and at Katihar on 23 July, with protest activity recorded at Munger on 23 July where the use of force is not established; police firing during a student protest at Siwan on 25 July 2026; and a fourth entry for Maharashtra which is deliberately open: reports refer to an incident there, the archive has not been able to locate it, and the record says that and makes no guess. * **30 evidence records and 71 sources**, 23 of them with an archived copy taken so the citation survives if the original page changes or disappears. * **46 questions with no answer**, each tied to the office that would hold the answer. * **No order authorising force, of any kind, for any of the four incidents.** ### What has been established, and what has not Two governments have now put an account on affidavit before the Supreme Court, and the archive records what each affidavit says while being explicit that a statement on affidavit is evidence of the statement and carries no proof of the event. **Bihar has told the Supreme Court that its police discharged firearms at Siwan** on 25 July 2026: four rounds from an AK-47 near JP Chowk, and two rounds from a 9mm pistol near Hathi Chowk, on the account reported on 18 August 2026. That is the state's own description of what its officers did, and the archive records the discharge as established on that basis while adopting none of the state's characterisations of why. The same affidavit says the AK-47 was a platoon-level weapon meant for special operations, and that routine law-and-order duty falls outside that purpose. That is an admission about deployment; it says nothing about conduct on the day, and deployment is an authorisation question. Who decided that such a weapon would be present at a student protest is recorded as unknown, and is one of the 46 open questions. **A police diary entry is reported to record whose orders the munitions were used under.** Two outlets say they have read a Delhi Police General Diary entry of 22 July recording what was used at Jantar Mantar two days earlier (tear smoke, shells, an anti-riot gun and two rounds of plastic pellets), and recording that it was used under the orders of a Deputy Commissioner of Police. That is the first thing on this record connecting the force used to an officer who ordered it. It is not an order, and the archive does not hold the entry: it holds two reports of one. The count of orders found stays at zero, because that number counts orders the archive holds. Separately, replies to Right to Information applications filed by Saket Gokhale, a Trinamool Congress leader and former Rajya Sabha member, are reported to record that at least ten people were treated at Delhi government hospitals on 20 July for injuries the hospitals themselves categorised as pellet or projectile injuries: nine at Lady Hardinge Medical College and one at Safdarjung. AIIMS refused the same question under section 8(1)(j), saying a number could identify a patient. That work is his alone and is credited to him. Hospital records are independent of both the police and the petitioners, but a clinical category is not a finding about a weapon or about who fired it, and the archive says so on the record. Around that entry sits a dispute the archive has recorded as disputed rather than resolved. Delhi Police said publicly on 22 July that it "neither possesses pellet guns nor were they used". The diary entry, as reported, says otherwise. The petitioners before the Supreme Court say metallic pellets were fired and that fragments were found in injured people, which is a different claim again from the plastic pellets the entry records. Counsel has told the Court that from 1967 to now no standing order or regulation mentions pellet guns at all. That is a submission only, and the archive records it as one. The Court is reported to have directed the police procedure onto the record and the Rapid Action Force ammunition log preserved; both are open questions here. **Delhi Police has stated on affidavit that facial recognition technology was deployed at Jantar Mantar.** The deployment itself is recorded as corroborated. Whether it was confined to persons with existing criminal records, as Delhi Police asserts, is recorded as disputed, because the accounts conflict and the archive holds nothing that settles it. The archive's first primary document is the Delhi High Court's own cause list for 22 July 2026, which fixes the case number and the bench in W.P.(CRL) 2127/2026, *Shakeel Abbas v. Union of India and Ors.* It is filed with a note on what it does not establish: a cause list shows that a matter was listed and before whom, and says nothing about what was ordered. The reported directions in that proceeding remain corroborated and become verified only when the order itself is in hand. The National Human Rights Commission took suo motu cognisance on 25 July 2026 and gave the Commissioner of Police, Delhi, two weeks to report. That deadline has passed. The archive records the date it fell due. No right to information application has been filed by the project yet. The questions and the offices that hold the answers are published in advance, and the site is built to record each application, the statutory clock it starts, and any silence that follows it. ### How it works The archive is a set of records. When a document arrives, the record it concerns is updated in place, so every change is listed publicly with the date and the commit it landed in, and is available as a feed. Checks run on the archive itself, and none depends on trust. An automated check refuses a claim with no source. Another looks at anything marked corroborated and warns when every one of its sources traces back to a single origin: the check that caused one earlier finding on this site to be corrected. A daily sweep looks for new court listings, orders, parliamentary answers and reports, and logs the date it looked even when it finds nothing, so that "we found nothing" is never confused with "we did not look." The interface is available in Hindi. Records are not translated: each one says what its source says, in the language the source said it. Anyone can send a document. Photographs and video off the device that took them, notices, receipts, hospital slips, copies of an FIR, letters from an office. Nothing sent is published automatically and no sender's name is published unless they ask for it. ### Quote > [To be supplied: name and role of the person speaking for the project.] --- ## Notes for editors **Where the site is.** https://www.whogavetheorder.in **What it is not.** It is not a campaign, a petition or a list of allegations. It does not accuse any office of having ordered anything. It publishes documents and states plainly where documents are missing. **On numbers.** The counts above are as at 21 August 2026 and are generated from the records, so they change as the archive changes. The current figures are on the front page and at https://www.whogavetheorder.in/press.html, which reads them from the records as the page loads. **Citing it.** Every record carries a citation block with its identifier, its state, the date it was retrieved and a permanent link. The full record set can be exported. Records written by the project may be reused with attribution and a link back. Documents obtained from public offices are public records and the project claims no rights over them. **Corrections.** corrections@whogavetheorder.in. Corrections are applied to the record and appear in the public change log with the date. **Documents.** evidence@whogavetheorder.in **Legal.** legal@whogavetheorder.in **Short version, for a pitch email.** A public archive at whogavetheorder.in records police use of force against students in India and tries to establish who authorised it. It holds four incidents, 30 evidence records and 71 sources, and 46 questions nobody has answered. A police diary entry is reported to record that the munitions used at Jantar Mantar were used under a Deputy Commissioner of Police's orders; Bihar has told the Supreme Court its officers fired an AK-47 and a pistol at Siwan; Delhi Police has admitted deploying facial recognition at Jantar Mantar. No order authorising force has been found for any of the four. Nothing appears on the site as a fact without a source, and every gap is named and left open. **A note on labels.** If you quote the archive, please carry the label with the claim. "Corroborated" and "verified" mean different things here, and the difference is the point of the site. *Ends.*