The Indian authorities have gone to draconian lengths to stop people attending an anti-government protest in Delhi, placing the capital under a severe lockdown and detaining tens of thousands of people including the leader of the youth-led “Cockroach” movement.
Thousands of people from across India were blocked from attending the demonstration, which had been called by the “Cockroach Janata party” (CJP) movement to protest against an exercise that has stripped 130m names from India’s electoral roll.
The Cockroach movement, as well as opposition parties, civil society and student groups, have alleged that the process of “purifying” India’s voter roll was done to entrench the power of the Narendra Modi government and have called for India’s chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, who oversaw the exercise, to resign.
Delhi police denied permission for the protest to take place in central Delhi, and in the days leading up to Saturday, officials began to barricade the roads throughout the capital. Over 30,000 police and security personnel were deployed across Delhi, many pulled from other states.
The oppressive response had drawn criticism from Abhijeet Dipke, the founder and leader of the CJP, who accused the Modi government of being “scared” of the youth who were rising up in protest. “The mass crackdown on protesters and the shutdown of Delhi are not signs of strength but of a leader terrified of his own people,” said Dipke.
By Saturday morning, police had boarded Dipke’s plane as it landed at Delhi airport and immediately detained him, alongside several other senior figures in the Cockroach movement. In a video recorded just before police detained him, Dipke said: “If you think you can stop us by threatening us with jail, then you have it wrong. Put us in jail if you want … but we will keep fighting to protect the democracy of this country.”
Others involved in the CJP movement were also detained by police across the country, with arrests and detentions reported to be in the tens of thousands. One of India’s most popular YouTubers, Dhruv Rathee, who has 33m followers and become a vocal backer of the CJP, was among those put under house arrest by police.
Student groups, who have been equally vocal in their call for Kumar to resign, had described the march as India’s “second freedom struggle”, akin to Gandhi’s fight for independence. As police began mass detentions on Friday night, Neha Bora, a student leader who has been at the forefront of the protests, said: “History is repeating itself. Just like in 1942, the arrest of leaders could not stop the Quit India movement; this movement will also not stop”. By Saturday afternoon, Bora too had been detained.
Over its 14 years in power, the Modi government has been rigidly intolerant of dissent but few protests have prompted such an overzealous nationwide crackdown. In major disruption to national travel, all trains arriving into Delhi’s two main train stations on Saturday were cancelled for a 10 hour period and almost 50 metro stations were shut. Delhi’s schools and courtrooms were instructed to go online for the day and hotel owners were told to turn away customers.
Traffic diversions were set up across Delhi and police checkpoints were also set up along the main highways from neighbouring states into the capital, with passengers stopped and interrogated about their final destination. Delhi police told Uber drivers not to drop people near the protest area and said they were “tracking and stopping” bulk orders on food delivery services to Jantar Mantar.
In Mumbai, housing societies sent out mass WhatsApp messages, telling parents to “mind your kids” and make sure they didn’t attempt to travel to join the protest.
Around Jantar Mantar, which had previously been Delhi’s designed protest site and where the Cockroach supporters had hoped to gather, most of the main thoroughfares in the centre were shuttered and barricaded, surrounded by impenetrable walls of police and paramilitary officers. Riot-control vehicles stood nearby, along with trucks fitted with water cannon.
Buses sat waiting to detain anyone who attempted to turn up and reach Jantar Mantar, with more than 10,000 detained by Saturday afternoon. Among those who tried to reach the site was Paravin Singhal, a 75-year-old lawyer. He had left home at 5am and shown his court identity card at checkpoints along the way, only to be stopped about 200 metres from Jantar Mantar.
Singhal said he had come to stand with young people fighting to save the country from what he described as a “lawless regime playing with the constitution”. He accused Modi’s government and the Election Commission of using the revision of electoral rolls to influence future elections.
The issue was personal for him. After voting in elections for 50 years, he said, he had recently been told that his name had been removed from the electoral rolls. “How can this happen to someone who has been voting for 50 years? What is even more disturbing is that the government is taking away our most fundamental right – the right to vote.”
Despite the heavy-handed action by the police, Singhal said he would stay put in the hope that more protesters would arrive. “The government is afraid because young people in this country are awake. They know their rights and are fighting for them. That is why the government is behaving like a dictatorship.”
Amina Minnath, an undergraduate student at Delhi University, had also made her way to the area with a small group of friends. They had left before sunrise and navigated the checkpoints. The police barricading of Delhi, she said, had only strengthened her determination to protest.
“These restrictions show that the government does not care about people’s rights,” she said. “This will not stop us. We may be detained, but we will come back in greater numbers. This will not end in a single day.”
The controversial revision of India’s electoral rolls, in a process known as “special intensive revision (SIR), began last year and attracted criticism from civil society groups and the opposition alliance after it emerged that millions of names were being deleted.
The backlash became even more pronounced when SIR was held in the state of West Bengal and it became clear that Muslims and other minorities, who are traditionally do not vote for Modi’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata party (BJP), were being disproportionately stripped of their vote.
Yet it didn’t become an issue of national outrage until late last month, when the Indian Express newspaper published an investigation that exposed multiple irregularities in the SIR process, which had been flagged in more than a dozen internal objections but had been unilaterally overruled by Kumar.
The opposition parties, alongside the Cockroach movement and student groups, began to call for the resignation of Kumar, who was appointed by a committee led by Modi. This week, India’s main opposition Congress party, also tried to reach Jantar Mantar to protest but were blocked by police and Congress leader Rahul Gandhi was detained twice.
This week, the supreme court ordered the Modi government and the election commission to respond to the allegations. A BJP spokesperson said they had “no base, not an iota of evidence” and accused them of being driven by “an irresponsible, anarchist opposition”.
Saturday’s protest came in the aftermath of the triumph of the Cockroach movement in July, when it led mass protests that forced the resignation of Modi’s education minister. Since then, India’s youth have proved much more willing to openly criticise the Modi regime and have expressed mounting anger at the obstruction of their freedom to protest.
Many, such as Prakhar Vashishth who is in his early 20s, remained defiant despite the aggression of Delhi police. He too had recently been asked to submit additional documents to establish his eligibility to remain on the electoral rolls.
“We are living in extraordinary times, and young people in this country must come out to defend their future,” he said, as he stood near the police barricades around Jantar Mantar.
“This government will go to any lengths to stay in power, even changing election rules or removing people it believes will not vote for it. But they cannot keep us away for ever.”
