Bare skin doesn't usually make it past the lanyard check. At high-stakes tech summits, the dress code is usually a depressing sea of tech-bro fleeces and "smart casual" blazers that cost more than a month’s rent in Old Delhi. But this week’s AI Summit in the capital didn’t stay behind the glass. It spilled onto the street, got sweaty, and ended with the Delhi Police throwing the book at a handful of Youth Congress members.
We aren't talking about a civil citation or a slap on the wrist for blocking traffic. The police have doubled down, adding charges of rioting to the rap sheet of the arrested protesters. It’s a heavy-handed escalation for a demonstration that was, quite literally, an exercise in transparency.
The imagery was jarring. On one side of the security perimeter, you had delegates sipping overpriced lattes and debating the ethical guardrails of Large Language Models. On the other, you had young men stripping off their shirts to protest what they claim is a jobless future fueled by the very tech being celebrated inside. It’s a bit on the nose, isn't it? The people who feel stripped of their future decided to show up stripped of their clothes.
The Delhi Police, never known for their appreciation of performance art or political symbolism, didn't see a message. They saw a breach. By adding rioting charges—Sections 147, 148, and 149 of the legal code—the state is signaling that this wasn't just a loud afternoon in the sun. They’re treating it as a violent disruption of public order. It’s a convenient way to bury the actual friction of the protest under a mountain of legal paperwork.
The friction is real, though. You can’t ignore the price tag of these events while the youth unemployment rate sits in the corner like an uninvited guest. While the government rolls out the red carpet for AI giants and talks about India becoming a "global hub" for silicon, the guys on the street are worried about being replaced by a script. They aren't looking for a "human-centric" white paper. They’re looking for a paycheck.
The police narrative focuses on the chaos. They claim the protesters tried to break through barricades, turned aggressive, and created a "riot-like situation." Maybe they did. Or maybe "rioting" is just the easiest label to slap on a group of people who make the optics look bad during a sensitive diplomatic moment. Nothing ruins a keynote speech about digital progress faster than the sound of sirens and the sight of bare chests being shoved into a police van.
It’s the classic tech summit paradox. The insiders talk about "democratizing intelligence" while the actual democracy outside gets loud, messy, and eventually, handcuffed. The summit organizers likely wanted to talk about compute power and sovereign clouds. Instead, they got a reminder that "meatspace"—the real world where people have bodies, frustrations, and a lack of shirts—is a lot harder to moderate than a Discord server.
Adding rioting charges feels like a patch for a PR bug. If you charge them with simple obstruction, they’re out by dinner. If you charge them with rioting, you send a message to anyone else thinking of crashing the next tech-optimism party. It’s a high-friction response to a high-visibility protest.
But here’s the thing about labeling a protest a riot. It doesn’t actually solve the underlying bug in the system. You can clear the streets and you can fill the jail cells, but the anxiety remains. The summit will move on to the next city, the delegates will fly home, and the "AI for All" slogans will be peeled off the walls.
The Delhi Police might have successfully managed the crowd, but they’ve also ensured that the story isn't about the tech anymore. It’s about the state’s refusal to hear a scream unless it’s muffled by a charge sheet.
If the most sophisticated predictive models in the room couldn't see a shirtless protest coming, how much do they really know about the people they're supposedly building this future for?