NEW DELHI: Indian police detained several people in the capital New Delhi on Saturday, disrupting a second day of protests backed by the Gen Z-led Cockroach Janta Party and other opposition groups against changes to voter rolls.
The protesters say the changes benefit Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing party and are demanding the resignation of India’s election chief.
The demonstrations mark the latest in a series of youth-led protests that have emerged this year, putting pressure on Modi unprecedented in his 12 years in power.
About 100 demonstrators removed security barricades on Saturday and chanted “vote thief, leave the post” and “Gyanesh Kumar, step down” before police forcibly detained some of them. Independent Member of Parliament Kapil Sibal, left-wing All India Students’ Association President Neha Bora and political activists Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav were among the protesters, according to a Reuters witness.
The police declined comment on the number and identity of those detained.
“First they removed people from the voters list and now they are not letting us raise our voice against this. This is not acceptable,” Bora told Reuters.
The chief of the Election Commission, Kumar, has not commented on the protests and the demands to step down. On Friday, police stopped a group of protesters from gathering, bundling them into buses. Several nearby metro stations remained shut amid tight security.
Though police released many of those detained on Friday, they charged several of them with allegedly violating orders banning mass gatherings in Delhi, according to a police source. Critics say a nationwide voter-verification exercise launched last year has led to millions of eligible voters being removed from electoral rolls.
The commission, long regarded as one of the country’s most trusted institutions, says the exercise is intended to remove duplicate, deceased or ineligible voters.
On Friday the commission directed officials to register newly eligible voters and those omitted from electoral rolls.
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