Indian police have detained scores of dissenters, including the founder of the country’s “Cockroach” party after he landed in New Delhi, as authorities try to quell protests demanding the resignation of the elections chief.
A video posted online by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), the upstart youth movement that began as online satire in May, showed its leader Abhijeet Dipke being escorted from an aeroplane by police on Saturday.
Dipke, whose movement has become one of the biggest political challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi, had called for peaceful protests against chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over a controversial voter verification drive. Police had warned that the CJP did not have permission to protest.
On Saturday, authorities placed New Delhi — the centre of a region that is home to more than 20mn people — under lockdown. They have also deployed more than 20,000 security personnel, closed metro stations, shut down mobile internet services, barricaded roads and issued threats of arrest from loudspeakers in an effort to stop demonstrators from reaching Jantar Mantar, a 300-year-old observatory, to protest.
CJP leaders strongly condemned the heavy-handed state response, accusing the government of turning Delhi into a “cantonment or fortress” and claiming that “over 15,000” people — including students, civil society members and political figures — “faced illegal detentions and police clampdowns”.
The FT was unable to independently verify the number of detentions. Delhi police did not immediately respond to a request to confirm the number of detentions.
The movement added Dipke and some of his close associates were being held at an “undisclosed” location while police had “corralled” many of the detained protesters into a stadium. “All are there because the system wants us silenced” but it will not “break our resolve”, said Vijay Mallangi, a CJP spokesperson.
UN human rights spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan urged Indian authorities to “immediately and unconditionally release” all those “arbitrarily detained”. The foreign ministry responded that such “concerns are misplaced and constitute an unwarranted interference” in India’s internal affairs.
Video description
CJP leader Abhijeet Dipke was detained by police after landing in New Delhi on Saturday
Dipke has spearheaded demands by opposition parties and youth groups for Kumar to resign after an estimated 130mn names, the equivalent of about 13 per cent of the total electorate, were removed from India’s voter rolls since last year.
Critics said the deletions affected the outcome of some recent state elections that Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won. The controversy comes ahead of a string of key state elections that are set to begin early next year.
Modi’s government has rejected accusations that the revision of voter rolls was politically motivated, with Kumar defending the commission’s independence and the electoral body saying the names were duplicates or people who were deceased or had relocated.
“You can see where the nation is headed, they are here to arrest us directly from the flight. This is something not even Indira Gandhi has done,” Dipke said in a video taken during his arrest, referring to the former Indian prime minister who imposed a state of emergency under which political opponents were jailed.
BJP president Nitin Nabin blamed the CJP and opposition parties for attempting to create an “extremely dangerous and serious situation in the country”. He added that “the government of India will deal with it strictly”.
Ajai Sahni, head of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, said: “There have never been such restrictions at this scale, particularly in the absence of any evidence of violence as far as the CJP protests are concerned . . . it reflects a degree of panic in the government.”
The CJP began as a satirical online campaign. In July, it staged the biggest protests in the capital for years at Jantar Mantar, in a move that forced the education minister to resign.
Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi said on X: “Mr Modi , do whatever you want. Call out all the police: 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, whatever you want. Arrest all the leaders. Arrest all the young people. Arrest us all. We are surrounding you and we are not going to back down . . . Youth of India, I am proud of you. Keep protesting.”