NEW DELHI: Police in the Indian capital detained scores of protesters on Saturday amid patrols by thousands of security forces, with travel and telecoms links suspended, in a lockdown to stop a youth protest asking the election chief to quit.
The protest by the “Cockroach” youth movement, aims to draw thousands of demonstrators against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over a revision of voter lists that critics say favours Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Television images showed police in the central business district of New Delhi chasing down a few dozen young protesters, some wearing backpacks, before they were loaded into vehicles and hauled away.
About 200 protesters were detained in the area, a police source told Reuters. Those detained outside Delhi included protest supporter Dhruv Rathee, a popular figure on YouTube, a police spokesperson said.
With metro stations and markets shut and mobile internet suspended, police boarded buses to check for protesters after stopping them at points of entry into the city, with cars and other vehicles also subjected to checks, Reuters witnesses said.
Barricades and concrete blocks stopped traffic, while anti-riot vehicles mounted with tear gas guns were stationed on key routes, they said.
“Why is the prime minister so scared of the country’s youth, the country’s people?” Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the self-named ‘Cockroach Janta Party’ that called the protest, asked on Saturday, shortly before leaving for Delhi.
“Why did you need to close all the railways, the metro, the internet has been closed, roads have been closed? … this is nothing but fear,” he told the ANI news agency in the financial capital of Mumbai.
The protesters have said they plan to gather at Jantar Mantar, a protest site designated by authorities in the heart of New Delhi, at 10 a.m.
New challenge to Modi
The protest, touted by the CJP as an effort to “Save Democracy”, is planned as the biggest of a series of demonstrations launched last week after the Indian Express newspaper said Kumar’s deputies had queried and disagreed with him over list revisions that dropped about 130 million voters.
That number exceeds the population of Japan.
Opposition parties have long accused the government of trying to fix voter lists to its advantage and were quick to resurrect the allegations following the report.
Kumar has not commented but the Election Commission and the BJP have denied the allegations.
The BJP says Modi’s popularity and India’s economic growth are key reasons for its electoral dominance and accuses opposition parties of misleading the country as they are unable to win elections.
Nonetheless, the near daily protests by opposition groups pose a new political challenge to Modi, just months after similar demonstrations forced his education minister to quit over exam paper leaks.
They also come months before a series of key state elections starting in early 2027, among them one in the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, ruled by the BJP.
On Friday, Delhi police said they had not given permission for the protest and violators would face the force of the law.
Their “temporary and precautionary” curbs aimed at regulating people’s movement, preventing overcrowding, maintaining public order, and ensuring the safety of protesters and others in the affected areas, police said in a statement.
CJP leaders rejected the police decision and said they would go ahead with the protest as it was their fundamental right.
Deletions affected state polls, opposition alleges
The protesters accuse the BJP of using the revision of voter lists to sway election results, in collusion with its appointees in the Election Commission, including Kumar.
Opposition parties say the voter deletions affected the outcome of some recent state elections won by the BJP, and have cast a shadow on the electoral process in the world’s largest democracy.
Election Commission data, also cited by the BJP, shows about 130 million names, have been deleted from voter lists during the verification exercise, including 63 million who relocated, 30 million who could not be traced, and 28 million dead.
The commission says the count represents voter entries flagged during the draft revision stage, that the exercise is not complete yet, and voters wrongly removed can enroll again.
