India detains student leaders in major crackdown on protests

Indian authorities detained leaders of a youth-led protest movement and their allies on Saturday and imposed sweeping restrictions in central Delhi to stop crowds from gathering for a planned demonstration against a contentious revision of voter rolls.

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Police detained Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke and spokespersons Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, taking them off a flight from Mumbai shortly after it landed in the capital. The party’s legal head, Ratna Singh, was also detained. The CJP alleged thousands of its supporters have been held to prevent them from joining the demonstration.

“You can see where the nation is heading, they are here to arrest us directly from the flight,” Dipke said in a video recorded as police officers crowded the plane’s aisle. “This is dictatorship.”

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The protest was called to demand the ouster of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over his handling of the voter-roll overhaul, an exercise launched last year to remove dead, duplicate and ineligible voters from India’s electoral rolls. More than 130 million names have since been removed. Critics say eligible voters have also been dropped, potentially affecting election outcomes.

Authorities imposed unprecedented restrictions across the capital, deploying thousands of police on the streets and asking telecom operators to suspend internet services near the protest site for about 24 hours from Friday night. As many as 60,000 police and paramilitary personnel were put on standby for deployment, Bloomberg News reported Friday, citing a person familiar with the matter. The Home Affairs Ministry didn’t respond to an email seeking comment on the internet suspension.

“Freedom of movement stands completely shackled,” Shashi Tharoor, a lawmaker from the opposition Indian National Congress, said on X. “A government confident in the fairness of its elections would welcome questions about them, whereas one that turns its capital into a fortress to avoid them only deepens the very suspicions it seeks to suppress.”

The crackdown has extended to the CJP’s allies. Those detained Saturday include Mamata Banerjee, an opposition leader from West Bengal state; Brinda Karat and K.K. Shailaja, leaders of the Communist Party of India (Marxist); Dhruv Rathee, a social media commentator with 19 million Instagram followers; Tushar Gandhi, a great-grandson of Mahatma Gandhi; and student activist Neha Bora. Several lawyers demonstrating outside the Supreme Court were also picked up by the police.

Delhi Police told reporters Friday that any gathering by the CJP would be considered illegal, and “proper legal action will be taken against” those in violation. On Saturday, hundreds of demonstrators on their way to the protest site were loaded onto buses and driven away. Much of central Delhi was heavily barricaded, with water cannons, tear-gas launchers and anti-riot vehicles on standby. Metro and railway services were severely restricted, and liquor stores across the city were ordered shut to maintain public order.

The CJP spearheaded one of India’s biggest student protest movements in years, culminating in the education minister’s resignation in July.

Opposition parties have staged planned and impromptu demonstrations throughout the week, with several lawmakers briefly detained. The stakes are high for both the opposition and Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling party, with key state elections approaching, including in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state with about 250 million people.

The controversy deepened in late September after the Indian Express reported two election commissioners had raised concerns about the process with Kumar at least 14 times over a 10-month period. India’s top court added to the scrutiny this week, questioning changes to a form used to register new voters.

The Election Commission has denied the Indian Express report, saying its decisions were unanimous and that differing views are a normal part of the decision-making process. Modi’s party has dismissed the demonstrations as an attempt by the opposition to discredit democratic institutions after failing to win elections. It has also defended the voter-roll revisions as necessary to remove ineligible voters.

—With assistance from Akriti Sharma and Shruti Mahajan.

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