Abhijeet Dipke, Mamata Banerjee and student activist Neha Bora were among those detained before the Jantar Mantar protest could begin. The movement’s demand: the election chief must go.
A capital sealed off
Tens of thousands of security personnel, rows of metal barricades, drones overhead and human chains of police: Delhi woke on Saturday to restrictions among the most sweeping seen in recent years, deployed to prevent a single demonstration from reaching Jantar Mantar.
It worked, at least in the literal sense. By midday the crowds that had been expected had not come close. Janpath Market, normally packed on a Saturday afternoon, was emptied of shoppers; reporters with press passes were turned away at the barricades.
The detentions
The crackdown began before the protest did. Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke, along with leaders Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, was detained shortly after flying in from Mumbai — officers boarded the aircraft. “They are here to arrest us directly from the flight,” Dipke said on video as police approached. “This is dictatorship. Come arrest us. We are not afraid of you.”
The CJP alleges the three are held at an undisclosed location, denied lawyers and cut off from contact. Delhi Police had not publicly confirmed the detentions. Hundreds more were reportedly rounded up across the capital from Friday evening.
Others fell through the day: former West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and Trinamool Congress leaders were detained at South Avenue after a sit-in; student activist Neha Bora was taken near Safdarjung flyover, posting from detention: “I am in detention. The movement is not… sit down where you are and hold the line.” Economist Jean Drèze was lifted bodily after raising a poster near the site and put on a bus.
The provocation, and the pivot
Dipke started the movement in May, almost as a joke, after Chief Justice Surya Kant likened jobless youngsters to “cockroaches.” It has since hardened into a vehicle for anger over unemployment, exam-paper leaks and government accountability. Saturday’s protest targeted a specific name: Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
Under Kumar, the Election Commission carried out a nationwide electoral-roll revision it calls routine housekeeping against dead, duplicate and ineligible voters. More than 130 million names were removed, and in several states tens of thousands allege they were wrongly deleted. The CJP and opposition parties accuse Kumar of favouring the BJP; the Commission and the BJP deny it, adding that “differing views” are normal in its decision-making.
The counter-narrative
BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra dismissed the day as “the flop show of anarchist elements” that had “completely collapsed,” insisting “India is calm and going ahead under good governance.” Delhi Police call the protest illegal, saying permission came too late and citing the CJP’s July demonstration, permitted as a one-day event, which ran for weeks, turned violent and cost the education minister his job.
The human ledger
At New Delhi Railway Station, cancelled trains and internet shutdowns stranded travellers. “I have nothing to do with the protest, but I still have to suffer,” said Manjeet Dua, who had come from Bihar for a job interview.
Three Newslaundry reporters were detained and their phones seized, the outlet says, before being released after more than an hour driven around the city. Scroll reported a detention too.
And in Maharashtra’s Hingoli district, as Dipke sat in police custody, his 78-year-old grandmother Savitribai Shankar Dipke died after a long illness. His father does not know whether his son has been told, or will be allowed home for the last rites.
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