Indian police have released the founder of a youth-led political “Cockroach” movement after a day in custody over widespread protests· in the capital that are challenging the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
Abhijeet Dipke of the upstart Cockroach Janta Party and two of his close associates were let go by a court order in New Delhi on Sunday. He had been detained inside a flight shortly after it landed in the capital the day before.
Dipke, who at the time of his release sported a shirt with Mahatma Gandhi on it, had called for peaceful protests demanding the resignation of the elections chief. But the Delhi police denied permission for the proposed Saturday demonstration and tightened security across the Indian capital of more than 20mn.
The trio of “cockroaches”, as they call themselves, was released on the condition that they would maintain “peace and good behaviour” for a year.
“The government has made a big mistake by arresting our leaders and clamping down on democracy,” Ajinkya Shinde, a CPJ leader, said on Sunday after calling for further protests and labelling the detentions “unlawful”.
The movement said in a social media post after Dipke’s release: “You forgot what cockroaches do best — survive. We are back.”
Delhi was turned into a fortress by security forces over the weekend — with barricades and tens of thousands of police and paramilitary personnel — following a week of demonstrations demanding Gyanesh Kumar to step down.
Police were seen dragging protesters by their clothes and stuffing them into buses and cars. Senior members of the opposition, including former chief ministers of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee, and Delhi, Arvind Kejriwal, were also detained as they headed to protest on Saturday.
“This is worse than the Emergency,” said Kejriwal, in a reference to 1975, when the late former prime minister Indira Gandhi imposed a state of emergency under which civil liberties were suspended and political opponents were jailed.
On Saturday, Shinde claimed that “over 15,000” people “faced illegal detentions and police clampdowns” after Dipke called to remove the head of the election commission Gyanesh Kumar over a controversial voter verification drive. Delhi police did not reply to requests for comment.
The anger against what Kumar called an exercise to “purify” the electoral rolls, which removed an estimated 130mn names from the register, has turned into one of the biggest political challenges to Modi since he rose to power in 2014.
Young dissenters and veteran politicians claim the voter deletions may have benefited Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in some recent state elections, casting a pall on the electoral process in the world’s largest democracy.
The CJP began in May as a satirical online campaign conceived by postgraduate student Dipke in the US after he heard a Supreme Court judge dismiss India’s unemployed youth as “cockroaches”.
After Dipke returned to India in June, it morphed into a national protest movement seeking reforms to India’s education system to stop corruption and improve fairness and opportunity. In July, it staged the biggest protests seen in the capital in years, forcing the education minister to resign, marking one of the worst political crises of the 12 years in power of the prime minister.
Amit Shah, Modi’s powerful home minister, said on the eve of the weekend protests that “the BJP, under the leadership of Narendra Modi, continues to win elections one after another despite the lies and disinformation campaigns” by the political opposition led by Rahul Gandhi of the Indian National Congress party, whose coalition called for further rallies on Monday.