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Indian police arrested the founder of the ‘Cockroach’ party after he landed in New Delhi as authorities tried to quell protests demanding the election chief’s resignation.
A video posted online by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), the upstart youth movement that began as an online satire in May, shows its leader Abhijeet Dipke being escorted from a plane by police on Saturday.
Dipke, whose movement has emerged as 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. The police had warned that the CJP did not have authorization to demonstrate.
On Saturday, authorities placed New Delhi, where more than 20 million people live, under lockdown. They deployed more than 20,000 security agents, arrested hundreds of dissidents, closed metro stations, cut mobile internet services, barricaded roads and issued threats of arrest over loudspeakers in an effort to prevent protesters from reaching Jantar Mantar, a 300-year-old observatory.
“Jantar Mantar is a protest site. If people are not allowed to come here, it means someone is really scared and something is wrong in our democracy,” said a 33-year-old protester who wished to remain anonymous.
Dipke has spearheaded demands from opposition parties and youth groups for Kumar to resign after around 130 million names, or about 13 percent of the total electorate, were removed from India’s electoral rolls.
Critics said the deletions affected the outcome of some recent elections won by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Modi’s government has rejected accusations that the review of electoral rolls was politically motivated and Kumar, who is due to resign in 2029, defended the independence of the commission. The commission said the names were duplicates, had died or had moved.
The controversy comes on the eve of a series of national elections expected to begin early next year.
“You can see where the nation is going, they are here to arrest us right from the flight. This is something even Indira Gandhi didn’t do,” Dipke said in a video taken during his arrest, referring to the former prime minister who imposed a state of emergency under which civil liberties were suspended and political opponents imprisoned.
BJP president Nitin Nabin accused the CJP and opposition parties of trying to create an “extremely dangerous and serious situation in the country”. He added that “the Indian government will deal with this issue strictly.”
Ajai Sahni, director of the Institute for Conflict Management in New Delhi, said: “There have never been such restrictions on this scale, especially in the absence of any evidence of violence in relation to the CJP protests… this reflects a certain degree of panic within the government.” »
The CJP began as an online satirical campaign. In July, he staged the largest protests in the capital in years, at Jantar Mantar, forcing the education minister to resign.
“Peaceful protesters must be able to demand accountability from those in power without facing intimidation, arbitrary detention or sweeping restrictions on their freedom,” said Aakar Patel, chair of the board of Amnesty International India.
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