Indian police detained demonstrators in New Delhi on Saturday as a second day of protests pressed the chief of the Election Commission of India to resign over changes to the country’s voter rolls.
About 100 demonstrators pulled away security barricades and chanted “vote thief, leave the post” and “Gyanesh Kumar, step down” before officers moved in, Hiru News reported, citing Reuters. Police declined to say how many people were held or to identify them.
Those taking part included the independent member of parliament Kapil Sibal, All India Students’ Association president Neha Bora, and the activists Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav.
“First they removed people from the voters list and now they are not letting us raise our voice against this. This is not acceptable,” Bora told Reuters.
A movement born from online satire
The protests are led by the Gen Z-founded Cockroach Janta Party alongside student coalitions and opposition groups. Al Jazeera reported that the movement began as online satire mocking the government before gathering millions of social-media followers, and that mass demonstrations it drove in July preceded the resignation of India’s education minister.
On Friday, the first day of this round, police and paramilitary units surrounded a barricaded protest site in central Delhi and loaded demonstrators onto buses as they arrived. At least 11 metro stations around the Jantar Mantar observatory were closed. Delhi Police imposed an order barring gatherings of more than five people. By mid-afternoon, more than 500 people had been detained in the capital, among them the former Delhi chief minister Atishi Marlena. Parallel protests were held in Mumbai.
Many of those held on Friday were released, though several were charged with breaching the ban on mass gatherings.
The dispute over the rolls
The Cockroach Janta Party called this round of protests after the Indian Express reported that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s two deputies had formally raised concerns at least 14 times in the past 10 months about voter-list revisions, registration procedures and the commission’s digital systems.
Critics say a nationwide voter-verification exercise launched last year has removed millions of eligible voters from the rolls, and that the effect favours Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. The commission, long regarded as one of India’s most trusted institutions, denies this and says the exercise removes duplicate, deceased or ineligible entries. On Friday it directed officials to register newly eligible voters and those left off the rolls.
Kumar has not commented on the protests or the calls for him to go. The party says it will widen the demonstrations nationwide.
