By Saurabh Sharma, Sarita Chaganti Singh and Arpan Chaturvedi
NEW DELHI, Oct 11 (Reuters) – New Delhi braced for a second day of youth protests demanding the resignation of India’s election chief on Sunday, as a court ordered the release of “cockroach” movement founder Abhijeet Dipke and two other senior leaders.
Dipke and the other Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) leaders were detained when their plane landed in Delhi on Saturday as the movement planned to gather thousands of people at Jantar Mantar in Central Delhi.
The court ordered their release with an undertaking to “maintain public peace”, the CJP said in an official statement.
“Cockroaches never die,” the group posted on its X account shortly after Dipke’s release.
The youth movement is one of the biggest political challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his 12 years in power, during which his Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has repeatedly swept the polls and eliminated any serious challenge by opponents, including the Congress Party.
The protesters are calling for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over a revision of voter lists that critics say disproportionately benefits Modi.
Sporadic protests have been going on across India since the Indian Express newspaper in late September reported Kumar’s two deputies raised several concerns internally about voter list revisions, registration procedures and digital systems.
The Commission says differing views are normal in internal deliberations, and has denied favouring any party.
Election Commission data cited by the party shows about 130 million names, more than the population of Japan, have been deleted from electoral rolls during the verification exercise, including 63 million people who had relocated and 30 million who could not be traced.
Modi’s BJP has accused groups opposed to it of trying to undermine the country’s democracy by wrongly questioning legitimate electoral processes.
The BJP and the Commission deny allegations of manipulation, although opposition parties say Muslim voters and other minorities, who are unlikely to support the Hindu nationalist ruling party, are disproportionately impacted by the deletions.
CRACKDOWN ON PROTESTERS
Activist and social media influencer Dhruv Rathee, who was also among those detained, was released past midnight.
“I was not arrested or detained, I was KIDNAPPED,” Rathee, who has more than 33 million YouTube subscribers, said in a post on X.
Protests on Sunday were subdued as of noon, with a few dozen people from student organisations chanting slogans condemning Kumar and police detaining some of them.
Thousands of police and paramilitary personnel continued to be deployed across the city although metro stations reopened and mobile internet services were back up after the authorities locked down the city in an attempt to thwart Saturday’s protests.
With access to Jantar Mantar blocked on the first day, Neha Bora, emerged as a new face of the protests, urging people to regroup at Dilli Haat, a crafts market 10 km (6 miles) away.
The national president of the left-wing All India Students’ Association was among more than 2,000 activists detained on Saturday.
Most of them were released late on Saturday night, police said.
Opposition parties and critics of Modi’s government criticised what they said was the high-handed use of force against the protesters, while a UN body called on authorities to ensure that the right to peaceful assembly was respected and fulfilled.
India’s foreign ministry said the UN’s statement constituted “an unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of India.”
At an unusually packed hearing on a Sunday, the Supreme Court recorded the government’s assurance that lawyers and journalists would not be impeded while performing their duties.
Lawyers protesting outside the Supreme Court were detained briefly on Saturday, as were several reporters including a Reuters journalist.
Abhita Ruheja, a protester who was detained on Sunday, said the authorities had turned Delhi into a fortress.
“Is this how a democracy works? They have been scrapping rights after rights and this is turning into a dictatorship,” she said.
(Reporting by Saurabh Sharma, Sarita Chaganti Singh, Adnan Abidi and Arpan Chaturvedi in New Delhi. Writing by Shilpa Jamkhandikar; Editing by Praveen Menon and Kate Mayberry)
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