Indiaupdated 1h ago3 min read
India Police Detain More Than 1,000 Protesters, Including Cockroaches Leaders, In New Delhi Lockdown
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More than 1,000 protesters detained in New Delhi during Cockroach Janta Party protests. Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, detained on landing.
Delhi lockdown and detentions
Police in India’s capital New Delhi detained more than 1,000 protesters, opposition politicians, journalists, student union leaders, lawyers and the founders of the “Cockroach” youth movement as authorities moved to quash a demonstration demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
The protest targeted Jantar Mantar, a designated protest site in central Delhi, but security forces sealed off the area before the demonstration began and the Indian capital went into lockdown with trains to New Delhi cancelled, mobile internet services suspended and metro stations and markets shuttered.
BJP spokesman Sambit Patra dismissed the demonstrators as “anarchic elements,” saying “Their flop show has been completely demolished,” while the CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke told officers in an Air India plane after Delhi police entered the aircraft: “I have come to get arrested. I am not afraid of you guys.”
Antena 3 Noticias put the number of detainees at around one thousand, and it said at least two police officers and several protesters were wounded during the police operation that blocked the protest called by the Indian Generation Z movement known as the “Cockroaches.”
Competing claims and quotes
Ajinkya Shinde urged citizens to keep mobilizing after the movement’s leadership was detained, posting: “Wherever the Police stop you, turn that place into your Jantar Mantar,” while the BBC said Delhi Police had refused permission for the protest to take place at Jantar Mantar and had detained the CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke shortly after landing in Delhi. Dipke warned, “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,” and the Election Commission denied allegations that the voter list revision was manipulated to favor Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Al Jazeera said the protesters accused the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of using the SIR to sway election results in collusion with its appointees in the election commission, including Kumar, and it quoted Shranaya, a state committee member of the left-wing Students’ Federation of India (SFI), saying: “This is dictatorship live and in front of us, just to protect a bureaucrat who steals elections for the BJP on Modi’s behest.” Dipke accused the government of fear, saying: “The mass crackdown on protesters and the shutdown of Delhi are not signs of strength but of a leader terrified of his own people.”
What is at stake next
The protests centered on a revision of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) and on demands for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, with the BBC saying the election commission described its update of electoral rolls nationwide as a routine exercise to weed out dead, duplicate or ineligible voters. The exercise stripped 130m names from India’s electoral roll, and the Cockroach movement and opposition parties called for Kumar to resign over allegations that the “purifying” of the voter roll was done to entrench the power of Narendra Modi’s government.
“The protester described the heavy police presence as a ‘game of perception.’”
Cooperativa said the CJP’s demand targeted the body in charge of administering elections, and it described opposition and youth organizations alleging that the purging of the roll could leave millions unable to vote and benefit the BJP. DW reported that police detained thousands of protesters in a major crackdown and that tens of thousands of security personnel were deployed and roads barricaded across New Delhi to prevent the latest CJP demonstration, while it quoted a protester describing the police presence as “a game of perception.”