India protest updates: ‘Cockroach’ leaders detained; New Delhi in lockdown

This live page is now closed, but our round-the-clock coverage of the situation in India continues.

You can read our wrap for the day here and follow more related stories here.

We will be closing this live page shortly. But before we do, here’s a recap of the day’s major developments:

• Police ⁠in ⁠the Indian capital detained the founder of ⁠the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), Abhijeet Dipke, and thousands of others to block a protest demanding the resignation of ‌the chief election commissioner over alleged voter list fraud.
• Dipke said his detention shows that India is under “a dictatorship” as thousands of police and paramilitary personnel were deployed across New Delhi, where mobile internet services were suspended in the central business district, and dozens of metro stations and markets were shut to stop the rally.
• Police in New Delhi also detained Neha Bora, the national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), among others, including journalists, lawyers and opposition politicians.
• Opposition Congress party’s leader Rahul Gandhi said the chief election commissioner and Prime Minister Narendra Modi “will go” soon and then “the repair of democracy will begin”.
• BJP spokesman Sambit Patra dismissed the demonstrators as “anarchic elements”.
• Amnesty International slammed India for “suppressing critical voices”, while the Committee to Protect Journalists urged Indian authorities to “respect journalists” and allow them to work.
• The CJP says its protest will continue despite the crackdown.

Special Intensive Revision (SIR), as the process is called, places an unusually heavy burden on existing voters to prove their eligibility.

The drive, launched in June last year, requires people to produce old records, like birth, land, and education certificates – and puts poorer, migrant, and marginalised Indians at a disadvantage, essentially drawing lines on who gets to vote in India. A minor mismatch, such as a spelling, in decades-old records could result in being struck from the voter list.

For India’s more than 1.4 billion population, a voting right does not end merely on ballots – rather, several government welfare schemes are tied to voting rights.

In some places, the SIR exercise was an alleged ploy to disenfranchise the Muslims who do not usually vote for Modi’s BJP. In West Bengal, which the BJP won for the first time earlier this year, nearly 34 percent of deleted voters were Muslims. A similar pattern has been reported from other states with a high percentage of Muslims, including Bihar, Delhi, and Assam.

So far, more than 130 million people have been removed from the electoral rolls, with the opposition parties alleging the deletions helped the BJP win several of the recent state elections. The have challenged SIR in the Supreme Court and demanded the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar for launching the exercise with little transparency.

“Today, that faith [in the election process] has shaken. It is very shocking for the nation,” SY Quraishi, who headed India’s election commission between 2010 and 2012, told Al Jazeera last month.

“The Election Commission used to be a very reputed institution. Now, it is totally dysfunctional – and that’s an understatement.”

The global human rights organisation has condemned the Indian authorities for the mass detention of protesters, saying that New Delhi is creating “a climate of fear”.

“Reports of more than 5,000 people, including opposition leaders, student union leaders, journalists, and lawyers being detained by the Delhi Police point to a desperate attempt by the government to suppress critical voices,” Aakar Patel, Amnesty International India chief, told Al Jazeera.

“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,” he said, urging the government to exercise “utmost restraint and take all necessary steps to protect and facilitate the right of peaceful assembly”.

“The authorities must also immediately lift all the arbitrary restrictions imposed in Delhi to restrict people’s right to protest, which violate India’s obligations under international law. The Delhi Police must not forget that the right to protest is protected in India’s constitution,” he added.

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.

But political analyst Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay said the protest comes at a time when Modi appears to be “at his weakest politically and individually”.

“And I see this becoming a bigger challenge in the coming months,” he told the AFP news agency.

India’s Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) is calling for another senior official to resign.

In July, protests by the youth-led movement saw the education minister quit. Now, it wants Gyanesh Kumar, the chief of the election commission, to step down.

Critics say Kumar oversaw an unfair review of the electoral roll. The revisions led to the removal of tens of millions of eligible voters.

The commission says reform is long overdue – and necessary to weed out duplicate entries. Protesters say it is an assault on democracy and designed to benefit the governing BJP.

So, will the “cockroach” movement be successful again?

The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) was born in the middle of May this year as an online satirical movement in response to a comment made by India’s Chief Justice Surya Kant, who compared the unemployed youth and activists to “cockroaches” and “parasites”.

Here’s how its protests have grown since:

June 6: Hundreds of CJP supporters wearing cockroach masks and carrying exam guides gather at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar to protest exam system failures and demand the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.

July 20: More than 10,000 CJP protesters attempt to march to the Indian parliament, demanding Pradhan’s resignation. The march led to heavy clashes with the police, who deployed tear gas, canes, and even pellet guns, according to witnesses and rights groups.

July 21: CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke announces the movement will halt street marches through New Delhi due to safety concerns for young participants, though the campaign against Pradhan would continue.

July 24: CJP leaders hold talks with federal ministers in New Delhi to discuss exam paper leaks and Pradhan’s resignation.

July 25: CJP protesters end weeks-old agitation “in good faith” after Pradhan resigns.

October 2: On the birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, the youth movement launches its “Protest 2.0” campaign, demanding the resignation of India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar for alleged vote fraud that favoured the BJP.

October 3-8: Daily demonstrations ripple through other major Indian cities, including Bengaluru and Mumbai. The left-wing All India Students’ Association (AISA) also led a march in New Delhi, resulting in violent clashes and the detention of hundreds of protesters.

October 10: CJP announces a national rally in New Delhi to demand Kumar’s resignation, but its leaders are detained upon landing in the city, along with hundreds of other protesters, including AISA’s Neha Bora, former West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee and ex-Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal, as police launch a sweeping crackdown.

We earlier reported that Bora, the national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), a leftist group affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist), had been detained.

Now, they have confirmed their detention in a post on X. “I am in detention. The movement is not,” Bora wrote.

“People are assembling at SAFDARJUNG FLYOVER right now. If you can, reach. If you are stopped, sit down where you are and hold the line,” they added, referring to a key street in southern New Delhi.

Earlier, AISA had announced that the protest venue had shifted from Jantar Mantar to Dilli Haat, a handicraft market near the flyover.

The press freedom body has told Al Jazeera that it is deeply concerned by reports of journalists being temporarily detained, having their movements restricted, and their equipment confiscated in India’s capital New Delhi.

“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,” said Kunal Majumder, CPJ’s Asia Pacific programme coordinator.

“Just as police personnel are doing their jobs, journalists are also doing theirs. A free and independent press is essential to democracy,” he said. “We urge the authorities in India to respect journalists’ and media workers’ ability to report in the public interest and ensure their safety while doing so.”

Shranaya, who goes by her first name, is a state committee member of the left-wing Students’ Federation of India (SFI).

She told Al Jazeera that its office in New Delhi had been under surveillance for hours, but members inside had managed to escape and reach the protest site.

“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.

Police in New Delhi have released some journalists working for the independent media outlet Newslaundry.

In a post on X, the organisation said its reporters were driven around New Delhi for more than an hour before being released.

“We will continue to report,” it added.

Earlier, we had reported that police had detained journalists from several media outlets, including Newslaundry and Scroll.in, as they tried to cover the protest.

For the “cockroach” movement, the voter list dispute offers an opportunity to broaden its campaign.

The movement began online in May and gained prominence through demonstrations, sit-ins and hunger strikes over alleged exam paper leaks. Those protests culminated in the resignation of Modi’s education minister in July, a rare political setback for a prime minister who has maintained a firm hold on power for more than 12 years.

For Modi, the protests pose a challenge midway through his third term although their political impact remains unclear.

National elections are not due until 2029, but state elections next year in BJP-ruled Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, and Gujarat, Modi’s home state, will test the party’s standing.

Abhijeet Dipke and two conveners of the Cockroach Janta Party, which called for today’s demonstration, had just landed in Delhi when they were detained.

You had the CJP livestreaming their detention on their Instagram. … As far as we know, he [Dipke] is still under detention and we are waiting for more clarity from the officials.

The CJP has said that even if its leaders are kept under detention, the young people of the country should step up and take ownership of the movement. They said youngsters should try and mobilise at Jantar Mantar and hold this protest on Saturday.

We know that other leaders of the “cockroach” movement have also been detained. Many of them have been put under house arrest in New Delhi.

The opposition has called this a “dystopian moment” in the history of India. The BJP has called the protest an attempt to destabilise India by “foreign forces”.