Ahmedabad: In the days leading up to a Rath Yatra procession, a Navratri block, a political rally or a VVIP visit, something changes sharply in how Ahmedabad police operate — and the numbers tell a striking story.An analysis of enforcement data spanning 587 days, from Jan 1, 2025 to Aug 10, 2026, shows that preventive arrests in the city more than doubled in the week to ten days before any major public event, jumping from a routine daily average of 42.6 to 106.5 — a spike of 150%.Over the full period studied, police recorded 25,006 preventive arrests in total, working out to an average of roughly 43 a day under normal circumstances. But that baseline tells only part of the story. Whenever the city braces for a large gathering — whether religious, political or protocol-driven — the machinery of preventive policing kicks into overdrive, more than doubling its daily output as officers move to detain those flagged as likely to cause law and order problem.The geography of these arrests is just as revealing as their timing. The East Zone alone accounted for nearly two-thirds of all preventive detentions — 16,254 arrests, or 65% of the citywide total — compared to 8,752, or 35%, in the West. Broken down by daily average, that’s 27.7 arrests a day in the East against 14.9 in the West, nearly double.Police attribute part of this imbalance to area sweeps and action against listed offenders concentrated in the zone, along with the timing of pre-event operations, but the data itself was silent on the deeper why. It doesn’t reveal whether the East simply has a higher concentration of potential troublemakers, whether it receives heavier police deployment, or whether it simply hosts more sensitive locations and events that trigger preventive action in the first place.There’s another gap in the numbers: the dataset doesn’t distinguish between unique individuals and repeat detainees, meaning it’s impossible to tell from the raw figures how many of the 25,006 arrests represent the same handful of people being picked up again and again versus a genuinely wide net being cast across the population.===========================================
