NEW DELHI — Indian police detained the founder and top leaders of the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party and hundreds of protesters on Saturday as tens of thousands of security personnel sealed off central New Delhi to block a rally demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, BBC News, Al Jazeera and DW reported.
Founder Abhijeet Dipke and fellow leaders Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka were detained on their flight from Mumbai after it landed, the movement said, adding that they had been taken to an undisclosed location and denied access to lawyers. Delhi Police, which had refused permission for the protest at Jantar Mantar, did not comment on the detentions, the BBC said. Before arriving, Dipke said: “If you think you can stop us by threatening us with jail or trying to intimidate us with the fear of imprisonment, you are mistaken.”
The government deployed nearly 30,000 personnel, cancelled trains to New Delhi, closed more than 50 metro stations and imposed an internet shutdown, and several students traveling to the capital were pulled off trains and buses and detained, Al Jazeera reported. “Narendra Modi just made EMERGENCY official,” Dipke wrote on X, invoking Indira Gandhi’s 1975 suspension of civil liberties, according to Al Jazeera. Interim leader Ajinkya Shinde told supporters that “wherever they stop you will become your Jantar Mantar.”
News outlets including Scroll and Newslaundry said their journalists were briefly detained while covering the protest, and the Committee to Protect Journalists urged Delhi Police to release all detained journalists and media workers, DW reported.
The protesters accuse Kumar of favoring Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party in a nationwide revision of voter rolls that Al Jazeera said has struck 130 million names; the Election Commission says the exercise is routine and removes dead, duplicate or ineligible voters, and it and the BJP deny any bias. The movement grew out of a viral post by Dipke in May after Chief Justice Surya Kant likened some jobless young people to “cockroaches,” and its protests in July forced the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
Sources: BBC News, Al Jazeera, DW
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