Saturday reminiscent of a state of emergency in the capital of India, with more than a thousand detainees locked up in sports stadiums. In anticipation of a day of youth mobilization, the authorities canceled 75 trains bound for New Delhi as well as 179 local convoys, closed 45 central metro stations, suspended internet within 4 kilometers and arrested several political and social leaders when leaving home or upon landing.
After two weeks of student and opposition protests for the head of the Central Electoral Commission to be removed, these reached the boiling point today due to the call of the Cucaracha People's Party. The CJP (for Cockroach Janata Party) is a protest formation that began as a joke by activist Abhijeet Dipke, less than five months ago.
Dipke was arrested this Saturday morning, as soon as he landed in Delhi from Bombay. There, two Fridays ago, his organization staged its first mass protest against the alleged manipulation of the electoral roll to benefit the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
But the petition for the dismissal of Gyanesh Kumar, chairman of the Central Election Commission, precedes the founding of the Cockroaches. This started from West Bengal last March, when the then head of government in Calcutta unsuccessfully denounced in Parliament what she believed was a manipulation of the electoral roll, two months before the elections that she would lose to the BJP. Indeed, the census revision disproportionately eliminated voting rights among the Muslim minority, who rarely vote for the BJP.
Suspicion arose a few months earlier, when the inspection of the names of those eliminated in the census of neighboring Bihar showed that a third were Muslims, double their demographic weight. At the national level there is talk of 130 million individuals erased from the census. Although two-thirds of them are deceased, the remaining third is still an enormous number, capable of altering the result of an election, according to the opposition.
The aforementioned Mamata Banerjee was arrested this Saturday, as was the former head of government of the federal district of Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal (AAP) or the veteran leader of the Communist Party of India (Marxist), Brinda Karat. Along with them, an influencer with 19 million followers on Instagram. It is this clamp between old school politics and new forms of communication and socialization, which had never taken hold before - in India the networks were always Hindu chauvinism - that appears particularly fearsome in the eyes of Narendra Modi.
But Hindu nationalism also understands tweezers and the 60,000 agents mobilized this Saturday in New Delhi were joined, in hot spots such as Connaught Place, by gangs of extremist organizations, from the same ideological matrix as the BJP, in hunting down protesters, according to witnesses.
But there is no turning back, according to Max, a 29-year-old Indian lawyer who sent La Vanguardia his photo with toothpaste as war paint (presumably useful against tear gas). "We are tired of being divided. Young people have realized that we are all in the same boat." According to the same protester, the inability to approach Jantar Mantar was dispersing the protests throughout the city. “This is going to be a long time.”
The surroundings of Jantar Mantar - a three-century-old astronomical observatory - have been the usual scene of protests and demands of all kinds for decades, some of which last for weeks, months and years. It is a symbol of Indian democracy, in the same way that Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park is for freedom of speech in England.
A symbol trampled by political power more and more often. Like this same Saturday, when the police banned the rally with very unconvincing arguments. So little, that he had to deploy sixty thousand agents armed with batons - actually rods - in addition to water cannons and tear gas.
Saturday's restrictions - "movement of groups of more than five people prohibited" - showed that the Modi government has "officially declared war on its own people," K.C. said. Venugopal, one of the main leaders of the Congress Party, the main opposition.
There is no doubt that the removal of the electoral roll disproportionately affects the popular classes. If not initially, ultimately, due to the lesser capacity to correct arbitrariness and much less in the short term before the elections. Something that is not the case for several Indian ambassadors or the Foreign Minister himself and his wife, who also discovered to their astonishment that their citizenship was questioned in the review of the electoral roll. This should not be confused with the simple census, which has been carried out in India every ten years for a century and a half, but was last done in 2011.
Now, the litmus test of the electoral roll will be at the beginning of next year, with the elections in Uttar Pradesh, the most populous Indian state, with 240 million voters.
