There is a particular helplessness in having a grievance and discovering that the act of expressing it may put you in danger. Whatever brought you out of the house remains unresolved. Now you must also decide whether you can afford to be seen objecting.
Arab News reports that UN experts have urged Indian authorities to stop using what the experts describe as excessive force to curb protests. That headline alone does not establish what happened at individual demonstrations, or settle the justification for particular police actions. It does bring a larger problem into view: how easily the wish to restore order can become a refusal to tolerate objection.
Order matters. People need to get to work, keep businesses open and move through their neighbourhoods safely. A protest does not acquire unlimited moral permission simply because those taking part believe in their cause. Other people have lives too, and authorities have responsibilities towards them.
Yet those responsibilities make restraint more important. The power to compel someone to leave, to detain them or to use force carries obligations that anger and inconvenience cannot cancel.
The temptation, for those watching from a comfortable distance, is to judge the whole affair by how quickly normal life resumes. But whose normal life? Someone who returns home because they are frightened may still carry precisely the grievance that brought them into the street. Quiet gives us very little information about whether anything has been resolved.
This matters beyond the conduct of governments, although the difference in power must never be blurred. In a family or workplace, too, an absence of complaint can be mistaken for agreement. If speaking carries a sufficiently unpleasant consequence, people learn to withhold what those in charge most need to hear.
We have to leave room for objections we find inconvenient, badly expressed or mistaken. Otherwise permission to speak depends on pleasing the person who can withdraw it.
When a protest ends, the useful question is whether those involved still have a credible way to pursue their grievance. If the only thing they have learnt is that speaking up is dangerous, the difficulty has been driven indoors, where it may be less visible and considerably harder to reach.