New Delhi, India – Central parts of the Indian capital turned into a ghost town on Friday as Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s police detained hundreds of protesters, as the ‘cockroach’ movement that ousted the country’s education minister this past summer joined opposition parties in demanding the resignation of India’s elections chief. The government shut down metro stations leading to central Delhi and suspended internet services. Heavily deployed government forces blocked all entries to Parliament Street and the Jantar Mantar protest strip – the stage of the youth movement that forced out Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan just two months ago.
Saurav Yadav, a 24-year-old musician from Gwalior, a city in central India nearly 335km (210 miles) from New Delhi, took an overnight bus to join the protest, called by the cockroach movement and joined by a spectrum of opposition parties and unions. But as Yadav approached the site – his first time in the Indian capital – he was dragged away by two policemen, even as he held the tricolour national flag in his hands. Just imagine, the only thing that gives them power is managed!” Yadav told Al Jazeera, sitting startled in the back of a police van.
But youth protest leaders, emboldened by their success against the education minister, face a new set of challenges as they set their sights on the Modi government’s most politically prized bureaucrat. Last week, India was shaken by new revelations showing divisions within the supposedly autonomous body that is in charge of conducting its elections over controversial policies that critics say have disenfranchised tens of millions of people. India’s Election Commission chief, Gyanesh Kumar, frequently overruled concerns raised by the two other election commissioners about the integrity of ongoing changes in the voter database, an investigation by the Indian Express reported.
The commission has not refuted the investigation, but indicated, since the revelations, that it was acting to address concerns raised by the other two election commissioners. The revelations came after a months-long struggle by India’s opposition parties to bring what they have described as the “sabotaging” conduct of the election commission to the fore, which they say is dictated by Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for its electoral benefit. Since June last year, the commission has been revising and updating the voters list statewide.
It has struck off more than 130 million names during the exercise since then, which the critics say targeted economically weaker sections, minorities and other vulnerable groups in Indian society disproportionately. The cockroach movement leaders moved fast to tap into the growing calls for Kumar’s resignation, terming it the “last call to save democracy”. The leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, has called for the election chief to be tried for treason against India.
N Sai Balaji, a senior leader of All India Students’ Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation that was at the centre of youth protests earlier this year, said that “people have been suspecting the election commission for a long time – and different people have been flagging a range of issues”. We just need to come out on the streets, and there will be no opposition to the central demand: Gyanesh Kumar needs to go,” Balaji told Al Jazeera. The success of the youth protests that ousted the education minister was credited to the unifying platform of education in India’s otherwise deeply divided society.
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