A section of protestors in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh locality on Saturday briefly opened a road that has been blocked due to an anti-Citizenship Act protest going on since December 15, PTI reported. Another group of protestors closed the road soon after it was opened, Deputy Commissioner of Police (South East) RP Meena said.
On Friday too, the Uttar Pradesh Police had reopened a road connecting Noida and Faridabad for about 40 minutes in an effort to ease heavy traffic congestion between Delhi and Noida due to the ongoing protest.
The protestors have occupied a stretch of GD Birla Marg, an arterial road that connects Delhi and Noida, which still remains closed. Residents of nearby localities have complained that the blockade is causing them inconvenience, and commuters on this route say it has added to their travel time. A petition was filed in the Supreme Court to get the road blockade removed.
Supreme Court-appointed interlocutors have been meeting the protestors every day since Wednesday to convince them to move their protest elsewhere. The demonstrators showed the mediators – lawyers Sanjay Hegde and Sadhana Ramachandran – the blockades that they said were set up by the police.
Scroll.in has mapped the roads in the area and found that the public inconvenience was not merely because of the closure of GD Birla Marg. Two alternative routes that could have been used by commuters have been barricaded by Delhi and Uttar Pradesh police. The traffic could have passed through the narrower Kalindi Kunj-Mithapur Road that runs parallel to GD Birla Marg, and could have functioned as an alternative route. However, Uttar Pradesh Police have blocked access to this road by placing barricades around the Kalindi Kunj Bridge that connects Uttar Pradesh to Delhi.
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