India Detains More Than 2,000 as Youth 'Cockroach' Movement Marches on Voter-Roll Changes
Delhi shut metro stations and cut mobile internet before the protest; three leaders were freed Sunday on a condition that they commit 'no breach of peace for one year.'
Leaders of the Cockroach Janata Party, an Indian youth movement, were released Sunday, a day after police detained them ahead of protests in New Delhi against a contentious revision of voter lists. The three leaders, Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, were freed on the condition that they commit "no breach of peace for one year," said Ratna Singh, the movement's legal director, in a social media post. It was unclear what the condition meant or whether it would limit their ability to join further protests.
Police boarded the leaders' flight from Mumbai after it landed in the capital on Saturday and took them into custody as they prepared to lead a demonstration. Authorities then launched a sweeping security crackdown in Delhi. More than 2,000 protesters were detained, including several opposition lawmakers. Train services to the capital were canceled, metro stations were closed and mobile internet was suspended in parts of the city. Police said most of those detained were released late Saturday.
After his release, Dipke called Prime Minister Narendra Modi "an embarrassment to India," writing on X: "Never has this country seen a bigger coward and bully."
The movement is demanding the resignation of the country's election chief, Gyanesh Kumar. According to Al Jazeera's earlier reporting, the protesters target the Chief Election Commissioner over a revision of the voter rolls that dropped 130 million voters nationwide. They allege the commission manipulated the rolls to favor Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party. The commission and the government deny the allegations.
The scale of the detentions is disputed. Earlier in the week, Ranka posted on X that at least 10,000 people had been detained across the country, a claim Al Jazeera said it could not immediately verify, though videos posted online showed activists being taken away in vans. Police declined to give a count of those held. In Delhi on Saturday, about 100 demonstrators removed security barricades and chanted slogans before police forcibly detained some of them, Al Jazeera reported.
The crackdown shows how seriously authorities treat a movement that has drawn in student groups and opposition parties. The Cockroach Janata Party has said it will continue the protests and end them only when Kumar resigns. The government's response, which combined mass detentions, canceled trains, closed metro stations and a regional internet shutdown, is likely to feed the movement's argument that dissent is being suppressed, even as officials maintain that the voter-roll process is lawful.
The conditions attached to the leaders' release, a one-year pledge to keep the peace, leave open whether authorities could use any future protest as grounds for new charges.
