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Eleven opposition leaders filed a petition in India’s Supreme Court on Monday evening against the Election Commission and its three members Image Source: @INCIndia on X The petition was lodged after the leaders marched to the court from central Delhi. It was recorded on the Supreme Court website on Monday evening. The petitioners are the leaders of the opposition in both houses of parliament, Rahul Gandhi and Mallikarjun Kharge; Akhilesh Yadav of the Samajwadi Party; Tejashwi Yadav of the Rashtriya Janata Dal; Supriya Sule of the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharadchandra Pawar); Sanjay Raut of Shiv Sena (UBT); Saugata Roy of the Trinamool Congress; D Raja of the Communist Party of India; M A Baby, general secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist); Mahua Majhi of the Jharkhand Mukti Morcha; and E T Mohammed Basheer of the Indian Union Muslim League. Rahul Gandhi and Kharge had written asking to meet Chief Justice Surya Kant on Monday afternoon to hand him a memorandum. He d...

Opposition leaders including Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and Akhilesh Yadav are currently marching through central Delhi towards the Supreme Court, where the opposition bloc said it would file a petition over the revision of electoral rolls and demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Thousands had gathered in the heart of national capital as the march moved from Connaught Place. This comes after the Chief Justice declined to receive the leaders and told them to come to the court by petition instead.  This is a developing story. The details above are the best available at the time of filing and may change as events unfold. Crowd and detention figures are estimates reported and have not been independently verified. This report will be updated.

Police removed Jantar Mantar as the Indian capital’s designated protest ground hours before opposition leaders began their march to the Supreme Court to file a petition over the revision of electoral rolls A standing order issued by Delhi Police de-notified the site, which sits a short distance from Parliament and has been the city’s permitted venue for demonstrations for decades. Three grounds were designated in its place. The order says the change follows recommendations by a committee set up by the union home ministry to examine alternative venues for citizens to exercise the right to demonstrate, and that revised procedures for the new sites will be issued separately. It partially modifies an order of April 2022. The announcement came hours after lawyers mentioned a petition in the Delhi High Court challenging the closure of Jantar Mantar to peaceful protest, telling the bench that no alternative site had been earmarked. The court listed the matter for Tuesday. It also gave police...

India’s Supreme Court sat on Sunday, outside its working week, and ordered the authorities to restore normal life in the capital and to ensure nobody was illegally detained for assembling peacefully. Representational Image Via: @SFI_CEC The court directed that Metro and railway services run normally, that internet facilities remain undisturbed as permitted by law and that people and traffic be allowed to move freely. It said lawyers must be able to work and recorded an assurance that neither lawyers nor journalists would be obstructed. Restrictions remained subject to the public order limits the constitution allows under Article 19. Police removed barricades outside the court the same day.  Three leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party were released after almost 24 hours in custody. An executive magistrate ordered that they commit no breach of the peace for a year. Police said a surety bond of 50,000 rupees had been furnished for good behaviour over that period. The three were...

The UN human rights office listed journalists among those detained during Saturday's protests in Delhi, a complaint India's own press body has made about the same protest site Representational Image The Press Club of India has said in a statement  that it was shocked and dismayed at the Delhi Police's actions against and treatment of journalists during the demonstrations at Jantar Mantar. The statement was signed by the club's president, Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty, and its secretary general, Afzal Imam. Journalists from independent organisations and news portals had carried press cards and repeatedly identified themselves as media, it said, and police had still behaved violently and aggressively, detaining some alongside protesters. Behaviour of that kind could not be normalised in a democracy, the club said. That journalists were unable to work freely at the heart of the national capital did not bode well for the trajectory of media freedom in India. The UN comment...

More than 7,000 people were taken into custody across the Indian capital on Saturday as an attempt to hold a rally demanding the chief election commissioner's resignation was shut down  Representational Image Source: @AiyarYamini on X  The operation ran ahead of the protest rather than in response to it. Policemen were reported picking people up from homes, streets and an airport gate hours before the announced start time, and the running total police gave reporters climbed through the afternoon from roughly a thousand to past three thousand and finally beyond seven. A case was expected to be registered over an alleged attack on police personnel too. Behind the day was the Cockroach Janta Party, which wants Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to go. Police had rejected the application to gather at Jantar Mantar, the sanctioned protest ground a few hundred metres from Parliament, on the grounds that the organisers had not satisfied procedural requirements and that ...

A delegation of Indian opposition leaders met President Droupadi Murmu on Friday to demand the resignation of the country's chief election commissioner Image Source: @INCIndia on X The memorandum set out four demands: that CEC Kumar resign and that a 2023 law granting the chief election commissioner and election commissioners lifelong immunity be repealed; that the ongoing revision of electoral rolls be suspended immediately and all 133 million deleted voters restored; that India return to paper ballots in all elections; and that assembly elections held in the past two years "in which conclusive evidence of vote chori has been presented" be repealed. Vote chori means vote theft. The President has no power to remove a chief election commissioner at her own discretion. Under the constitution the post can be vacated only through the procedure used to remove a Supreme Court judge, which requires a parliamentary majority the opposition does not have. सबसे पहले हिंदुस्तान के ...

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi told members of India's team at the WorldSkills Competition in Shanghai that the country's vocational training institutions matter no less than its elite engineering and management schools, at a meeting with the competitors at his official residence in Delhi on Friday Image Source: @BJP4India on X Practical skills are as important as academic degrees, Modi said. He congratulated the competitors on representing India and urged them to act as ambassadors for skill development. He said that as technology changed rapidly, young people had to keep acquiring new skills, upgrade the capabilities they already had and adapt to emerging technologies. He asked the competitors to build skills in line with what international markets require, and to pass their experiences and suggestions to the government so that India's training system could be improved. Establishing the country as a global source of skilled labour, he said, would need coordinated e...

The BJP used a day of by-election counting on Friday to mount a sustained attack on Rahul Gandhi, with its national general secretary Smriti Irani describing the results as democracy's reply to what she called mob rule Representational Image: BJP LiveCast Screengrab The phrase referred to a week of opposition demonstrations in the capital over the revision of electoral rolls, during which the Leader of the Opposition and other MPs were stopped and detained on successive days and at least 25 police cases were registered. Irani listed the seats where the BJP was ahead. In West Bengal the party was leading in Nandigram, which she described as having once been a symbol of left-wing violence and of resistance to industrial development, and in Rejinagar, where she said close to 71 per cent of voters belong to minority communities. In Assam the party was leading in the Nagaon Lok Sabha seat. In Puducherry she welcomed the victory of a candidate of the National Democratic Alliance. Coun...