New Delhi, India – Stand-up comic Brijesh Jha posted a parody video on Instagram last week to protest the removal of his name, along with his father’s and sister’s, from a voter list in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal. The video, which alleged that India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar had disenfranchised millions of voters at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), garnered 1.7 million views after it was posted on September 29. Two days later, Meta, the United States-based company that owns Instagram, took the video down, citing “local laws” without giving further explanation.
I have only one thing in this country – that I can vote. If you take that away from me, then I have nothing left. So I didn’t know what to do.
As an artist, I can just make art, or I can protest,” the Mumbai-based artist told Al Jazeera. Jha said his parody song was removed because the Modi government is “scared” after an investigation by the Indian Express newspaper last month revealed that two of the election commission’s three members had raised serious concerns over a controversial revision of voter rolls being conducted by the poll panel across the country. The exercise, known as the Special Intensive Revision (SIR), was launched in June last year to identify deceased, duplicate or dubious voters and remove them from the rolls.
So far, the process has deleted more than 130 million voters – nearly 14 percent of India’s total voters, an overwhelming number of them Muslims who do not usually vote for Modi’s Hindu nationalist party. The Indian Express investigation found that two of Kumar’s fellow election commissioners had formally objected at least 14 times to key decisions linked to the SIR exercise taken by their chief. Opposition politicians and critics accused Kumar, a Modi government appointee, of acting at the behest of the BJP and demanded an independent inquiry into the decisions taken by the election commission during his tenure.
The revelations have led to street protests across India, demanding Kumar’s resignation. On Tuesday, police in the capital New Delhi briefly detained the main opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, and other leaders of his Congress party as they tried to march to the election commission office. Nobody is going to escape.” In response, the BJP accused the opposition parties of “making a concerted effort to change the government”.
The Congress protesters and their political allies were back on the streets on Wednesday. Their demonstrations followed a series of protests by the satirical Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and a group of left-wing students in Mumbai and New Delhi since October 2. The CJP has planned another demonstration in New Delhi on October 10 if Kumar does not resign by then.
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