POLICE on Tuesday detained leaders of India’s youth-led Cockroach Janta Party after they climbed over barricades into Jantar Mantar, the capital’s historic protest ground, a day after police stripped it of its status as a designated protest site.
Ashutosh Ranka, Saurav Das and other members entered the site early in the morning holding the Indian flag and chanting slogans demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, before police took them away.
Holding up a copy of the constitution, Das asked: ‘Who is the home minister to snatch Jantar Mantar from us?’
‘You cannot denotify the resistance,’ party founder Abhijeet Dipke wrote on X. Das and Ranka later broadcast live from a police bus, vowing not to back down.
The detentions are the latest confrontation in a week of daily protests that has brought students, opposition parties and civil society groups onto the streets against the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of the electoral rolls, which has struck more than 130 million names off the register where Muslims and other minorities have been disproportionately purged.
In a statement in September, the CJP called for criminal proceedings against Kumar ‘immediately, and an answer to the question: Who gave him the orders?’
It wants all upcoming elections put on hold, the SIR frozen and the January 2025 voter list restored, along with an independent inquiry into how the revision was decided and Supreme Court custody of the SIR files.
It is also demanding the repeal of the 2023 law on the appointment of election commissioners and its replacement by a new law drawn up with the participation of civil society.
Anger boiled over after an Indian Express investigation reported that the commission’s two other members, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected at least 14 times to SIR decisions they said were taken without their knowledge.
‘Differing views and observations are a normal part of deliberation in any institution,’ the commission said.
The state’s answer has been force. Ahead of a CJP protest at Jantar Mantar on Saturday, authorities turned Delhi into a militarised zone of barricades, road closures and marching paramilitaries.
At least 245 trains in and out of the capital’s two main stations were cancelled, 45 metro stations shut, liquor shops closed and mobile internet cut in the heart of the city, while opposition parties said activists were held under house arrest.
The CJP’s founders were removed from an Air India flight shortly after it landed in Delhi. Police detained and later released thousands of people, around 2,000 in Delhi alone according to a home ministry official, with hundreds more held in Mumbai.
Video footage showed students and activists, women among them, being beaten, dragged off the streets and forced into buses.
A Supreme Court lawyer helping those detained was carried away by police, his shirt torn. In Mumbai, police whisked away Tushar Gandhi, the great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi, to stop him joining a local demonstration.
The Committee to Protect Journalists counted at least 37 journalists detained over Saturday and Sunday. At least five were struck by police, and some were dragged by their clothing.
Political activist Yogendra Yadav, himself detained, said: ‘I have been in public life and have watched politics for four decades now, and I have never witnessed this kind of preparation for a demonstration.
‘It was extraordinary by any stretch of the imagination.’
Despite what he called ‘terror unleashed by the state’, small groups staged flash protests across Delhi in defiance of the security cordon.
Student organisations have been at the heart of that defiance. Neha Bora, national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), was detained on Saturday.
Protesters surrounded the police bus carrying her and other student leaders near the Safdarjung airport flyover to stop it leaving.
‘This is our 1942. Their jails can hold a few of us but not all of us,’ she wrote, invoking the year of the Quit India movement against British rule.
‘Wherever any of us is stopped today, we sit down right there and begin. Every corner becomes Jantar Mantar.’
Danish Ali, joint secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union, said: ‘People have refused to be fearful any longer. They will come again and again. We are living in a democratic country, and protest is a fundamental right that no one can snatch away from us.’
The CJP was born as online satire after Chief Justice Surya Kant compared some unemployed young people to cockroaches during a court hearing in May.
He later claimed his remarks had been misinterpreted, but the insult had already become a rallying cry. Over the summer, the movement led weeks of protests over exam paper leaks and irregularities that ended in the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan, before growing into a pressure group channelling wider anger over unemployment and government accountability.
Its leaders have pledged to keep protesting until Kumar goes.
On Monday, Delhi police, acting on the recommendation of a home ministry committee, struck Jantar Mantar off the list of designated venues, after the CJP had given officers a 24-hour ultimatum to set a date for its protest.
Police named three alternative sites, Ramlila Maidan, Burari Ground and CBD Ground, where protests may be held with permission.
‘30 minutes after we went to Delhi Police asking for a date when we can go to Jantar Mantar, Jantar Mantar was de-notified as a protest site,’ Ranka wrote.
The same day, thousands of opposition supporters answered a call by Rahul Gandhi, Congress leader and leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, to march from Connaught Place to the Supreme Court, and the Congress petitioned the court against the voter revision.
Gandhi, who was himself detained with his sister Priyanka at an earlier protest, said in a video on Sunday that ‘Narendra Modi, Amit Shah, Ajit Doval and Mohan Bhagwat cannot silence India’s voice’.
‘These cowards cannot intimidate us. They will have to step aside,’ he said.
Communist Party of India (Marxist) MP John Brittas was carried off by paramilitary police on Sunday.
‘I was dragged to a police van by CRPF men, despite me telling them that I haven’t violated any law,’ he said.
In a letter to the president he wrote: ‘The assault continued even after I identified myself as a Member of Parliament.’
The Keralam assembly on Monday passed a resolution seeking Kumar’s removal.
Former election commissioner Ashok Lavasa called the SIR unprecedented and unfair.
‘For more than seven decades the ECI took it upon itself, as a duty, to enrol everyone who was eligible to vote,’ he said, warning that replacing a ‘friendly procedure’ with a hostile one ‘is not good for democracy’.
Yadav said the revision exposed a deeper capture of democratic institutions. ‘Elections are the only mechanism now left for the regime to stamp its legitimacy and election capture is critical to their survival.
‘And therefore, Gyanesh Kumar is critical,’ he said, pointing to a 2023 law granting election commissioners immunity for official acts which he said goes further than the protection given to judges.
The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party accuses the opposition of weaponising protest after electoral defeats.
Spokesperson Ravi Shankar Prasad said ‘the country will be governed by parliament, not by the streets’.
Yadav warned that the government’s refusal to budge would only raise the cost.
‘The longer they delay, the higher the stakes.’
