(The Turkish Post) – Indian police detained the founder of the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party and hundreds of protesters in New Delhi on Saturday, Oct. 10, as the capital went into a security lockdown to stop a rally against the country’s election chief.
Cockroach Janta Party leader Abhijeet Dipke and two other leaders of the movement were detained on arrival at Delhi airport on a flight from Mumbai, the party said. Television footage showed police chasing protesters in central Delhi and pushing them into vehicles.
The protesters are demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over a nationwide revision of voter lists that has removed more than 130 million names.
New Delhi under lockdown
Thousands of police and paramilitary personnel were deployed in central New Delhi from Friday. Authorities closed dozens of metro stations, cancelled several long-distance trains to the capital and suspended mobile internet around the protest site.
Police refused permission for a rally at Jantar Mantar, the central Delhi site where protests are usually allowed, saying the request had been submitted too late. Roads leading to the area were blocked with metal barricades.
Police set up more than 30 checkpoints on the roads into central New Delhi, where officers stopped and searched buses and cars, and prohibitory orders banning public gatherings were imposed in the New Delhi district.
The movement called the detention of its leaders a planned move to cripple the protest before it began.
Dispute over the voter list revision
The Election Commission of India is carrying out what it calls a “special intensive revision” of the voter list. It says the exercise is meant to remove duplicate and ineligible names.
Opposition parties and critics say the revision could strip millions of eligible citizens of the vote and benefit Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The commission and the government reject the allegations.
Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party has been briefly detained by police during the protests against the election chief, which have run for weeks with the backing of opposition parties and their student wings.
How the Cockroach Janta Party began
The movement started online in May as political satire. On May 15, Chief Justice Surya Kant likened some unemployed young people to “cockroaches” during a Supreme Court hearing on a contempt petition over the designation of senior lawyers, a remark that drew anger across the country. He said the next day that he had been referring to people who entered professions with fake degrees, and called reports that he had insulted unemployed youth “totally baseless.”
A day after the remark, Dipke, a 30-year-old political communications strategist, posted a joke on social media asking what would happen if all the “cockroaches” united. The Cockroach Janta Party grew out of that post, with a name that parodies the ruling BJP. Within days its Instagram account had more followers than those of the BJP and the Congress party.
The Cockroach Janta Party then moved from social media to the streets, staging sit-ins and hunger strikes over leaked exam papers. Those protests led Modi’s education minister to resign in July.
Since then, the Cockroach Janta Party has joined opposition parties and student groups in the campaign against the voter list revision, making the election chief its main target.
Elections ahead
Modi has led India for more than 12 years and is midway through his third term. The next national election is not due until 2029.
State elections due in early 2027, including in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, which the BJP governs, will be the next test of the party’s standing with voters.
