India opposition to huddle over tea after thousands march in their Delhi protest

India's main opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has invited fellow lawmakers of the INDIA bloc of opposition parties over high tea on Tuesday, news agencies ANI and PTI reported.

The meeting comes after thousands of opposition demonstrators, including activists and civil society members, marched to the Supreme Court on Monday evening in a protest heralded by Gandhi and the INDIA bloc.

Monday's large demonstration was the latest in a series of protests the world's largest democracy has been witnessing over an alleged manipulation of voter rolls.

India's Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar has come under public and opposition ire, with calls for him to resign amplifying, after a report last month found that Kumar took alleged unilateral decisions that resulted in a mass deletion of voters, allegedly violating the law.

Around 130 million names have been struck off so far from electoral rolls under the process called Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which began last year.

Critics say the exercise favors Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata (BJP).

The Election Commission of India and the BJP deny the allegations.

Kumar and Modi have not yet given a statement on the issue.

On Saturday, another protest called by the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) movement was thwarted by a mammoth deployment of police and paramilitary, leading to mass detentions,

BJP has slammed the CJP and INDIA bloc as 'anarchists'.

"There are no parallel protests. It's one protest, and it's a protest where everybody is standing together. Every single person is going to stand against these killers of our Constitution, these killers of our democracy. And we're not going to back down," Gandhi wrote on X after the rally.

Monday's opposition protest, that snaked through a heavily barricaded part of central Delhi, culminated with the opposition filing a joint petition in the Supreme Court against the SIR and the alleged irregularities.

On Tuesday, the opposition MPs are expected to discuss further plans in their joint protest, PTI reported.

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) said on Tuesday that three of its leaders were detained with other members as they were trying to reach Jantar Mantar in capital New Delhi on Tuesday.

Ashutosh Ranka, Saurav Das and Ajinkya Shinde, who have been among the main faces of the CJP's anti-election chief protest, were among those detained, the collective's founder Abhijeet Dipke said on X.

A video shared by Dipke purportedly shows CJP's activists scaling a gate with yellow police barricades on the other side and holding up the Indian national flag. They are then seen being chased and grabbed by police officials amid slogans of "Gyanesh Kumar, resign".

The detentions come a day after Jantar Mantar was delisted as the capital's designated protest site.

On Saturday, the CJP had called for a protest march to Jantar Mantar demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Police denied authorization for the protest and thousands, including CJP and student leaders, were detained.

The demonstrators decried the detentions, saying protest was a fundamental right.

Dipke, Das and Ranka were detained from an airplane as soon as they landed in New Delhi. They were released after spending nearly 24 hours in detention and vowed for a continued protest.

The CJP had given a 24-hour ultimatum to the Delhi Police on Monday to fix a date and time for the Jantar Mantar protest, before the site was delisted.

"You cannot denotify the resistance," Dipke said in his Tuesday post on X, tagging Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Jantar Mantar was also the ground-zero for the CJP in its debut agitation over India's examination system in July that forced Modi's education minister to step down, in a rare concession by the Modi government.

'Cockroach' movement leaders arrested ahead of protests

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