Controversy over successive arrests ahead of large-scale protests by 'cockroach' youth group

(Hanoi = Yonhap News) Correspondent Park Jin-hyung = Ahead of a large-scale protest by the Generation Z-led group Cockroach People's Party (CJP) targeting India's election commission's alleged unfairness, tensions are rising as authorities arrested several CJP associates.

On the 9th (local time), CJP announced on

CJP reported that the police assaulted and arrested Baliyan and others in the western Indian state of Rajasthan the day before, and Baliyan was later released.

Additionally, students traveling from Pune in the western state of Maharashtra to attend a protest held in the capital New Delhi on the 10th were reportedly picked up on a bus by the authorities and taken to an unknown location.

CJP founder Abhijit Deepke told X that CJP volunteers from the southern state of Telangana were also arrested in Bhopal, in the central state of Madhya Pradesh, and that a large number of arrests were being made ahead of the protest on the 10th.

“(Prime Minister Narendra) Modi thinks he can silence dissent by putting people behind bars,” he said. “The more arrests he makes, the more people will come out to protest.”

CJP spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka also said in the

CJP recently began a protest demanding the resignation of Election Commission Chairman Gyanesh Kumar and strengthening the independence and transparency of the Election Commission in response to allegations that the National Election Commission of India changed the voter list to favor Prime Minister Modi's ruling People's Party (BJP).

They announced that they would hold a large-scale protest at Jantar Mantar, a government-designated protest site in New Delhi, on the 10th.

Local police denied permission for the rally, but CJP co-founder Saurabh Das wrote in

The day before, protests against the National Election Commission took place in several cities across the country, including Bengaluru, the southern information technology (IT) hub, and Hyderabad, the capital of southern Telangana state.

They claimed that the National Election Commission is working to revise the list, which began in the middle of last year and has so far removed 130 million people from the voter list, in favor of the ruling party.

CJP founder Deepke, who attended the Bengaluru protest, took the stage with several voters excluded from the revised list and said, "These people are alive. They are not dead. What is dead is democracy."

Previously, on the 7th, Rahul Gandhi, former leader of the main opposition Indian National Congress (INC), was temporarily arrested by the police in New Delhi while marching to Jantar Mantar with other opposition lawmakers, but was released.

According to local media outlet Indian Express last month, the two remaining members of the three-member election commission, excluding Chairman Kumar, reportedly raised questions and protests about 10 times, claiming that some decisions and orders were made without their knowledge during the voter list revision process.

In fact, last April, in the eastern state of West Bengal, state legislative elections were held after about 9 million voters were deleted from the voter list, and the BJP won a landslide victory for the first time in the state.

However, the BJP and the Election Commission are fighting back, saying that all revisions to the voter list were done legally.

Previously, in June, the CJP began a protest against the leak of questions from the national medical school entrance exam, and after protests that lasted for about two months, the Modi government ended the situation in late July by promising to accept the CJP's demands, including the resignation of the education minister.

CJP was formed in May last year in the wake of Chief Justice of India Surya Kant's remarks comparing unemployed youth to cockroaches, and is putting pressure on the Modi government by gathering more than 23 million followers on Instagram alone.