New Delhi, India – A 19-year-old woman was detained by police during the youth-led antigovernment protests in the Indian capital over the weekend. The young woman, who asked to remain anonymous for fear of further reprisals from the authorities, said she was detained on Sunday as thousands of people congregated in central New Delhi. They were demanding the resignation of India’s Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, over alleged irregularities in electoral rolls, which saw the removal of 133 million people from the voter lists.
After the woman’s detention, she and several other demonstrators were taken on a police bus to a location about 50km from the protest site. With no cash and her phone battery drained, the woman spent nearly an hour wandering along a dark road, trying to figure out what to do next. A car pulled up and the driver asked if she needed any help.
When those volunteers finally helped me get back safely, it felt like a miracle. I had never imagined that someone I had never met would come forward to help me like that,” she told Al Jazeera. For a young woman in New Delhi, notoriously referred to as the “rape capital of India”, being alone in the middle of the night and getting into a car with strangers is not an easy decision.
The city records an average of three rapes a day. But the young protester said she immediately recognised one of the volunteers in the car. She had seen his videos online, in which he had asked the detained protesters whether they needed help.
Recognising a familiar face reassured her that the people offering the ride could be trusted. The woman was rescued using an AI-assisted tool developed by 25-year-old Rajiv Choudhary, who is helping protesters get home safely after being detained and dropped off by the police far away. Called the Detainee Gharwapsi Yojana, the initiative combines a digital dashboard with a network of volunteers who track information about police buses carrying detainees and arrange transport for those left stranded.
It is also a play on a campaign by India’s right-wing Hindu groups which want to bring the country’s Muslims and Christians back into the Hindu fold, claiming that their ancestors converted to “foreign” religions from Hinduism. Since the beginning of this month, India has seen near daily protests over alleged electoral fraud by Kumar and his commission. Led by the satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a number of left-leaning student groups as well as the main opposition Congress party, the protests have seen tens of thousands of people hitting the streets in New Delhi and other cities.
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