Police in India’s capital New Delhi have detained more than 1,000 protesters, opposition politicians, journalists, student union leaders, lawyers and the founders of the “Cockroach” youth movement in an effort to quash their demonstration demanding the resignation of the election chief.
The satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and other youth groups had announced a protest in the subcontinent’s capital for Saturday, aimed at Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over a revision of India’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR).
The protesters accuse the governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of using the SIR to sway election results, in collusion with its appointees in the election commission, including Kumar.
Meanwhile, opposition parties say the voter deletions also affected the outcome of some recent state elections won by the BJP, and have cast a shadow on elections in the world’s largest democracy.
The CJP had planned to gather thousands of people at Jantar Mantar, a designated protest site in central Delhi.
But on Saturday, the area was sealed off by security forces before the demonstration began.
The subcontinent’s capital was also in lockdown with thousands of police and paramilitary personnel deployed across the city, trains to New Delhi cancelled, mobile internet services suspended and metro stations and markets shut, in an effort to stop the protests.
BJP spokesman Sambit Patra has dismissed the demonstrators as “anarchic elements”.
“Their flop show has been completely demolished,” Patra said. “What is happening at Jantar Mantar, what you can see on TV and a few social media handles, is not India’s story. India is calm and going ahead under good governance,” he told reporters.
Police detained the founder of the CJP Abhijeet Dipke and his associates Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka in an aeroplane upon arrival to New Delhi from Mumbai.
Dipke shared a video on his Instagram channel, showing a team of police officers entering the Air India plane after it landed. As they came closer, he said: “I have come to get arrested. I am not afraid of you guys.”
In another video shared by Ranka, Dipke was seen addressing the other passengers on the flight.
“It was nice to know you all. We can see where the nation is heading,” he said. “This is dictatorship where Delhi police has entered in the flight and trying to arrest us.”
Delhi police also detained other CJP members, YouTuber and Modi critic Dhruv Rathee, Neha Bora, the national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), a leftist group affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), Dipankar Bhattacharya, the general secretary of the party, Prashant Bhushan, a senior lawyer at the Supreme Court, politicians Yogendra Yadav and Mamata Banerjee, among others.
Despite the detentions of the founders of the youth movement, small protests took place elsewhere in the city, including at the popular crafts market “Dilli Haat”.
But journalists trying to cover these protests and people attempting to protest anywhere in the capital were also detained and whisked away in police buses.
Shranaya, a state committee member of the left-wing Students’ Federation of India (SFI), who goes by her first name, told Al Jazeera that their office in New Delhi had been under surveillance for hours, but members inside had managed to escape and protest.
“This is dictatorship live and in front of us, just to protect a bureaucrat who steals elections for the BJP on Modi’s behest. They are murdering democracy in the daylight in the Indian capital,” she said.
“This government is unaware of the power of the people, and that is our upper hand. We do not have weapons, but we have zeal. We will be again on the streets, and we will keep returning,” she added. “We are students. We are unemployed. We are ‘cockroaches’ – and we will return.”
She then climbed a barricade but was dragged away by police and taken away in a bus.
The opposition Congress party’s president, Mallikarjun Kharge slammed Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government after the detentions.
“Modi government has turned the ‘Mother of Democracy’ into a ‘Muzzled Democracy’!” he posted on X. “Detentions, arrests, jails, lathis [batons] and pellets cannot deter the people of India. Since the days of our freedom struggle, the youth have been at the forefront of shaping the nation’s destiny,” he added.
Global human rights group Amnesty International warned that the detentions signal the Indian government’s desperate attempts to “supress critical voices”.
“The authorities must immediately and unconditionally release all those who have been detained solely for exercising their right to Freedom of Expression and Right to peaceful assembly,” Aakar Patel, chair of board of Amnesty International India, told Al Jazeera.
The Committee to Protect Journalists urged Indian police to “respect journalists”.
“We call on the Delhi Police to immediately release all detained journalists and media workers and allow the press to cover the ongoing protests in Delhi and the police response without interference,” Kunal Majumder, CPJ’s Asia Pacific programme coordinator, told Al Jazeera.
The demonstrations represent one of the most serious tests yet for Modi, stemming from allegations that election authorities improperly revised voter rolls ahead of recent state polls.
The unrest also came ahead of a series of important state elections beginning in early 2027.
Sanjay Kapoor, editor of Hard News Magazine and a political analyst, told Al Jazeera that it is “very strange” to see Modi’s government “so panic driven and fearful of what the protesters might do”.
“The truth is that the BJP and the centre have been very, very scared of how it will all play out,” he said.
Kapoor noted that most of the people coming to the protests do not want Modi’s BJP to continue to govern.
“Modi’s government has begun to lose a lot of credibility at the moment,” he said. “BJP is afraid that the ground has shifted dramatically against them and they would find it very difficult to come back to power,” he added.
