India Has Protested Over Laws Before Now It Is The Referee Under Scrutiny

A third day of marches in Delhi ended with buses, barricades and a student leader driven fifty kilometres out of the city before being let go. What the protesters want is the Chief Election Commissioner's resignation, which the Indian Constitution leaves almost nobody in a position to grant.

File Photo: @SpokespersonECI on X

Neha Bora was picked up for the third consecutive day on Sunday. She heads the All India Students' Association, a left-wing student body founded in 1990 and affiliated to the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, which has long been among the strongest organisations on campuses such as Jawaharlal Nehru University and Delhi University. She was taken from near Jantar Mantar at about five in the evening and driven to a police station in Narela, roughly fifty kilometres away in the far north of Delhi. She was released that same evening and posted a video afterwards. AISA says she came back without her bag or her phone. The officials have maintained that the police seized neither. Bora later said that she got her phone back. 

By then the protest had moved twice. It was to have originally begun at India Gate, where loudspeakers were telling people to leave before it started and buses were already waiting. Word went round that the gathering had shifted and hundreds walked to Ashoka Road, where barricades were pushed into the path of a riot-control vehicle and the day rapidly settled into a long stand-off. The stretch between Ashoka Road and Parliament Street stayed shut. Much of the traffic did not move until half past six.

How many were actually detained is still unclear but figures range between a hundred and 250 though the protesters claimed much larger detentions, at around 500. 

For readers outside India, the word detention in this particular context needs explaining because it does not mean here what it means in most other places. Almost everyone picked up over this weekend was released the same evening without being charged. Prohibitory orders under Section 163 of the criminal procedure code, which replaced the old Section 144 in 2024, allow a magistrate to bar five or more people from assembling. Protest at Jantar Mantar, the designated protest ground a few hundred metres from Parliament, requires written permission and permission for these marches was not granted. What follows is a familiar choreography that the Indian media has long covered where people gather anyway, police lift them into buses, the buses drive somewhere and ultimately everyone is let go. No court is involved in these detentions and nothing is tested. 

That choreography too has now become a part of the story. Three women journalists covering the protest have complained to the police of sexual harassment by some officers. The allegations have not been tested and IndianRepublic.in has not independently verified them but it is stated that the women have made their accounts public themselves. The district police have passed the complaints to the Crime Branch for what they call a fair and impartial enquiry. 

What all of this is actually about is the Chief Election Commissioner of India, Gyanesh Kumar, and a revision of the electoral rolls that has allegedly removed names on a scale without recent precedent. The protesters want him to resign but in reality the structure matters more than the slogans.

The Chief Election Commissioner is appointed under a 2023 law by a panel of three: the Prime Minister, a Union minister and the Leader of the Opposition. Two of the three sit on the same side. Once appointed, he enjoys the protection the Constitution gives a judge of the Supreme Court. Under Article 324, he can be removed only in the same manner and on the same grounds — proved misbehaviour or incapacity, established through a motion carried in both Houses of Parliament by a majority of the total membership and two-thirds of those present and voting.

The opposition does not have those numbers and will not have them at least before the 2029 general elections, which means the demand being chanted on Ashoka Road has no real mechanism behind it. The Chief Election Commissioner can leave only if he chooses to. No crowd, however large, can make that happen without his own choice and everyone on both sides of the barricade knows it full well.

Where decisions have actually been made is the Supreme Court, which has already intervened more than once in the roll revision, ordering that voters flagged by software be heard before being struck off, and in West Bengal taking the final stage out of the Commission's hands altogether and giving it to judicial officers. Pressure has also come from inside the Commission itself, where, according to an investigation by The Indian Express, the two Election Commissioners who serve alongside the Chief have objected on the record fourteen times in ten months to decisions they say were taken without their knowledge. Those are the venues with leverage. 

India has had a decade of large protests and most of them have followed a recognisable path. The movement against the citizenship law in 2019 and 2020 occupied neighbourhoods for months before the pandemic ended it. The farm laws drew farmers to Delhi's borders for a year and were withdrawn. Anger over leaked examination papers has repeatedly brought students onto the streets. Every major party also maintains youth and student wings numbering in the thousands, whose job is to produce a crowd at short notice, which is why a photograph of a dense gathering proves less about public feeling than it appears to. What circulates on social media is often a party's own apparatus, filmed well with high resolution cameras.

This movement, if one may call it so, is different in its target rather than its size. Previous protests have contested a law, a policy or an examination. This one contests the referee himself. It asks whether the body that decides who may vote can be trusted to decide and that is a question Indian politics has not had to hold open for very long before.

Meanwhile the electoral business of the country has carried on without interruption. The ruling alliance won Bihar in November 2025 with a thumping majority, the Bharatiya Janata Party emerging for the first time as the single largest party in that state. A by-election in Bankipur followed in July, and more seats for MLCs will be going to polls soon and campaigns and nominations are already underway. Attention has since moved to Uttar Pradesh, which votes in 2027. The Congress contested 399 of the state's 403 seats in 2022 and won two, taking 2.33 per cent of the vote, against the BJP's 255 seats and the Samajwadi Party's 111. It is now seeking an alliance on terms that it will not contest fewer than 150 seats. The Samajwadi Party has made no public counter-offer though sources have indicated that it is thinking a far lower figure. 

That is a different arithmetic beneath the surface. A party that is virtually absent from the campaign trail in the states where the calendar is moving is demanding the resignation of the official who runs the elections through a procedure that requires a parliamentary majority it does not have while the ruling coalition proceeds with its campaigns.

Over the coming days, the opposition's own protests against the Election Commission are due, and leaders said on Sunday that the protests would continue. Much of it is going to unfold in the coming days.