(Hanoi = Yonhap News) Correspondent Park Jin-hyung = As controversy arose in India that the National Election Commission changed the voter list in favor of the ruling party, the Generation Z group 'Cockroach People's Party' (CJP) called for the resignation of the election commissioner and predicted a large-scale protest.
According to Reuters and Bloomberg News on the 26th (local time), the CJP has decided to hold a large-scale protest demanding the resignation of Election Commission Chairman Gyanesh Kumar from the 2nd of next month.
The day before, CJP founder Abhijit Deepke (30) said on
This follows recent suspicions that Chairman Kumar had modified the voter list in favor of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling People's Party (BJP).
On the 23rd, the Indian media Indian Express reported that Chairman Kumar and the other two members of the three-member National Election Commission raised questions and concerns at least 14 times over the past 10 months about the National Election Commission's reorganization of the voter list.
Election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi are known to have expressed opposition to the complete list reorganization process, which deleted millions of people from the draft voter list, saying that some decisions and orders were made without their knowledge.
Kumar, a former bureaucrat, was appointed as chairman by the Modi government last year.
This report gives strength to the position of opposition parties, including the Indian National Congress (INC), who have claimed that the Election Commission deleted millions of voters in favor of the BJP and added new voters without verification procedures.
In response to this, the National Election Commission stated that differences of opinion among election commissioners are a normal occurrence that can occur in any organization and that all actions were legal.
The BJP also defended the National Election Commission, saying that any Indian constitutional institution, including the National Election Commission, is not subject to dictatorial rule and is functioning democratically.
However, the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, held large-scale protests the day before in at least 12 of India's 28 states, including the capital New Delhi, demanding Chairman Kumar's resignation.
Rahul Gandhi, leader of the Indian National Congress, said, "For the past three years, I have been exposing the issue of vote theft, and now the election commissioners themselves have admitted it and are revealing the truth. Kumar has committed an act of treason. He must resign immediately."
In Chandigarh, northwest India, and Patna, northeastern India, police fired water cannons to suppress protesters, and in northeastern Manipur state, police used tear gas to disperse protesters.
Previously, in June, CJP launched a large-scale protest against the leak of questions from the national medical school entrance exam. As the protests continued for about two months and spread not only to New Delhi but also all over the country, the protests came to an end in late July when the Modi government promised 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.
