New Delhi, India – Heavy police barricades line the streets around Connaught Place, the colonial-era square near Jantar Mantar, on Saturday morning as police have begun detaining small groups of protesters arriving for planned demonstrations.
They are here in support of the influential Gen-Z movement and Cockroach Janta Party, which have called for the resignation of India’s election chief, amid a bitter dispute over who gets to vote in the world’s most populous democracy.
Protesters are demanding sweeping reforms and a rollback of a controversial voter revision exercise which has struck 130 million names from the voter list.
For now, an eerie silence hangs over parts of central New Delhi. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has gone to lengths to turn the city into a fortress, deploying nearly 30,000 personnel onto the streets.
Police have also detained the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, Abhijeet Dipke.
Indian TV channels reported early on Saturday that officers met Dipke at the New Delhi airport after he arrived from the financial capital Mumbai and asked him to call off the protest as authorities had banned it.
CJP leaders Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka were also detained from their flight upon landing, the movement said in a statement.
On Friday, the government extraordinarily cancelled all trains to New Delhi; locked down more than 50 metro stations; imposed an internet shutdown; and sent personnel to thousands of students in local communities to warn them against participation in the protest.
Several students en route to New Delhi from different states of India were dragged out of trains and buses and detained by the police. Many have been placed under house arrest in cities hundreds of kilometres away from New Delhi.
The Cockroach movement says thousands have been detained across India as Modi’s government intensifies its crackdown. Yet undeterred protesters have pledged to keep returning to the streets.
‘Made EMERGENCY official’
Current restrictions in the Indian capital and the nationwide crackdown on protesters have evoked memories of the 1975 Emergency, when then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi suspended civil liberties, censored the press and jailed political opponents.
“Narendra Modi just made EMERGENCY official,” Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach movement, wrote in a post on X. “This intimidation is not going to work, Modi. The youth of this country are no longer scared of you.”
Neha Bora, the firebrand Gen-Z protest leader and the national president of the left student body All India Students’ Association, equated the Modi government with British colonialist forces that unsuccessfully clamped down on India’s independence movement. She called on the masses to join the protest.
On Saturday morning, young people were trying to respond to her call despite the police restrictions in place.
Santosh Kumar, 29, a street sweeper in the outer circle of Connaught Place, told Al Jazeera he feels frustrated seeing teenagers detained at police barricades.
“How can you stop these kids? They are detaining 10; 50 more are coming. Modi, the dictator’s time is up: He will not even stay until 2029 (the time of the next elections).
“This is the time we turn Delhi into Nepal and Bangladesh – learn from them and take back our country,” he says, referring to youth-led movements in those countries.
Sameer Irshad, 28, an engineer from Gurugram, approached the barricades near Connaught Place while pushing his 57-year-old mother Sheeba Abdi in a wheelchair.
Abdi told us: “This sort of crackdown, where we cannot peacefully express our dissent, is unseen in Delhi. Why has government turned this place into a fortress? Why are they so scared of citizens like me?”
Under house arrest
Last month, India was shaken by revelations of divisions within the supposedly autonomous body that is in charge of conducting elections, over controversial policies that critics say have disenfranchised tens of millions of people.
India’s Election Commission chief, Gyanesh Kumar, was accused of overruling concerns raised by the two other election commissioners about the integrity of ongoing changes in the voter database, an investigation by The Indian Express reported.
India is among the few countries to have taken an active approach to enrolling every last voter.
Critics say the ongoing revision of the voter list flips the foundational principle of Indian democracy: Demanding that citizens prove their voting rights, and disproportionately targeting economically weaker sections, minorities and other vulnerable groups in Indian society.
Arif, a 24-year-old district coordinator for the Students’ Federation of India, another left-wing student organisation to have joined the protest call, was locked in his home in Saharanpur, nearly 200km (125 miles) from New Delhi, on Thursday.
“Several police officials started beating my door out of nowhere late at night, asking my parents for details of my whereabouts,” Arif, who did not want to give his full name, told Al Jazeera from his home in Saharanpur, where he is currently ed under the police’s watch around the clock.
“They just want to stop me from going to Delhi for protest. They are threatening to book me under criminal cases and destroy my future,” he said, adding that this is the first time he has been subject to such detention.
“I really wanted to be in Delhi, to fight and reclaim our democracy. The time for Modi is over,” he said.
Modi ‘at his weakest’
This week, Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party (BNP) celebrated his 25 years in office, starting with his years as chief minister of the western state of Gujarat – where he oversaw the infamous 2002 Muslim pogrom – and later as India’s prime minister since 2014.
But Modi has never looked weaker in power than now, analysts and Indian political observers argue.
In July, the Cockroach-led protests choked key New Delhi streets and forced out Modi’s education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.
This time, Modi has taken more extreme measures to prevent protesters from gaining a foothold in central New Delhi, “because he wishes to retain the aura and image of a leader who never yields to public pressure, someone who is invincible”, said Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay, an author and biographer of Modi.
“Modi appears at the lowest point [of his political life] in public perception. This is extremely paradoxical because he has some of the most important autonomous institutions, large sections of the bureaucracy, and state wings in tight control and acting at his behest,” Mukhopadhyay told Al Jazeera.
In the face of growing protests, Modi is now “fast losing people’s perception of being a leader who leads them out of livelihood pits”, he said.
Prashant Bhushan, a senior lawyer at the Supreme Court and a rights activist who planned to join the protest on Saturday, told Al Jazeera that “Modi’s government looks quite scared of the people.
“People in India are rising and demanding answers. And when the government gets scared, they adopt draconian measures to stay in power,” Bhushan said. “But only more and more people will rise from repression.”
