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India’s defence minister said on Friday that some of those behind two weeks of protests over the country’s electoral rolls were seeking a change of regime on the Bangladeshi model and accused them of making young people instruments of what he called the politics of anarchy Representational Image Source: @rajnathsingh on X Speaking at a news conference in Lucknow, Rajnath Singh said one person had openly told a press conference that she drew inspiration for regime change from Bangladesh while another had spoken of bringing down the government. Their only agenda, he said, was to destroy democratic institutions and set the country alight. He was referring to remarks made this week. The student leader Neha Bora has reportedly said she is influenced by the movement that removed Sheikh Hasina from power in Bangladesh. The advocate Prashant Bhushan told a news conference on Thursday that a change of government was the declared aim, that this is the purpose of any opposition in a democracy...

A phrase with a long and loaded history entered India’s street confrontation over electoral rolls on Thursday, when advocate Prashant Bhushan said a regime change was a democratic right and the ruling party said the remark proved the protests had never been about voter lists at all Representational Image Via: @DrMeenaJangid on X Speaking at a news conference in Delhi alongside the student leader Neha Bora and the youth organiser Abhijeet Dipke, he rejected the government’s characterisation of the campaign. “This government keeps on saying this is the opposition’s operation of regime change. We are only appealing to save the electoral democracy in this country,” he said. Then came the conditional, and then the assertion. “If such barbarism continues, there will definitely be a regime change. We all want a regime change. Is there anything wrong with that? Regime change is a democratic right of every citizen, and creating disaffection against the government is not an offence.” He s...

India’s Supreme Court issued notices on Thursday across a cluster of cases arising from nearly two weeks of protests over the country’s electoral rolls, and one of the petitioners said the court had indicated it may frame guidelines to protect women demonstrators and women journalists Representational Image Via: @INCIndia on X The court issued notice to the Election Commission and its commissioners on the opposition petition over the revision of electoral rolls.  Petitions concerning the police operation of 10 October were heard together. The advocate Shailendra Mani Tripathi, one of the petitioners, said the court had taken cognisance and indicated it intended to issue guidelines, particularly for women protesters and women journalists.  The Delhi High Court separately declined to restrain a protest called for Friday at Central Park in Connaught Place, on an application by a licensed street vendor who said his business would suffer. The court recorded an assurance from t...

India’s Supreme Court is due to hear on Thursday an opposition petition seeking disclosure of the Election Commission’s internal files on a revision of electoral rolls that has allegedly removed about 130 million names Representational Image: @RahulGandhi on X The petition filed by Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the opposition in the lower house, and other opposition leaders, asks the court to order the release of the files, agendas, minutes, notings and objections recorded by the two election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi. It asks the court to examine those records to establish whether Chief Election Commissioner acted arbitrarily and unilaterally, and seeks an interim order suspending the revision while the case is decided.  The two commissioners are central to the dispute. The Indian Express reported earlier that they had raised concerns with the chief election commissioner at least 14 times over ten months about decisions on voter registration and deletion...

Two ministers from India’s ruling alliance challenged the opposition on Tuesday to answer ten questions over its campaign against the country’s electoral rolls and accused it of abandoning constitutional remedies for the street Image Source: @BJP4India on X Piyush Goyal of the Bharatiya Janata Party and Rajiv Ranjan Singh of the allied Janata Dal (United) spoke at the BJP’s headquarters, a day after eleven opposition leaders filed a petition in the Supreme Court and marched to the court demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Goyal invoked B R Ambedkar, who chaired the drafting committee of India’s constitution, paraphrasing his warning that abandoning constitutional methods when they are available is the grammar of anarchy. The Congress had never filed a sworn affidavit with the Election Commission setting out its allegations, Goyal said, and had filed no claims for inclusion or exclusion while the roll revision was under way. He asked why the party...

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 ...

Delhi Police have refused permission for a protest planned at Jantar Mantar on Saturday by the Cockroach Janata Party, and have registered 25 cases connected with a week of demonstrations so far Representational Image Source: @IPSMadhurVerma A joint commissioner of police, Nupur Prasad, said the force received an application on 7 October from the group's co-convenor, Saurabh Das, giving notice of a protest on 10 October over what it described as the accountability of the Chief Election Commissioner. Under the rules governing the site, applications must be submitted at least ten days before the event. The application arrived three days before.  Prasad said permission was also refused because the group had been allowed to protest at Jantar Mantar on an earlier occasion and had not complied with police guidelines or with the undertakings it gave at the time.  She cited the law-and-order situation, public safety and traffic management in the New Delhi district, and said pro...

The Leaders of India's INDIA bloc held a silent protest at Rajghat, the memorial to Mahatma Gandhi, on Thursday, a day after police detained them short of the capital's designated protest site.  Image Source: @INCIndia on X They said they prayed for wisdom for the government and for the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar.  They alleged that the prime minister, the union home minister and CEC had hijacked the country through what they described as a criminal conspiracy involving the theft of votes.  Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, LoP Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, along with other INDIA bloc leaders, staged the protest at Mahatma Gandhi’s memorial. The protest was peaceful today and police did not intervene, in contrast to the previous two days, when opposition MPs were stopped and detained on their way first to the Election Commission's headquarters and then to Jantar Mantar. चलिए शुरू करते हैं! https://t.co/kX3own1AUp — Supriya Shrinate (@...

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 maint...

A night of street violence in Thiruvananthapuram over the same demand the opposition alliance had agreed on hours earlier in the capital Representational Image: IndianRepublic.in On Wednesday afternoon in New Delhi, leaders of the Indian opposition INDIA alliance met for three and a half hours and announced a joint campaign, which included district marches from 2 October, a march to the Election Commission on 6 October, and a rally in Delhi on 1 November. Their demand was the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, and the suspension of a nationwide revision of electoral rolls. By Wednesday night in Thiruvananthapuram, the youth wings of two parties that had sat in that room were fighting each other over the same demand. A Youth Congress march to the Kerala secretariat, calling for Kumar to go, reached the Kerala University men's hostel near University College and turned violent. Youth Congress and KSU activists say members of the Students' Federation ...

The Indian government has named Pralhad Joshi as the country's new Education Minister after President Droupadi Murmu formally accepted Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation . By nightfall, the Cockroach Janta Party had called off its agitation at Jantar Mantar, most of the prevailing security had been withdrawn from the protest site, and the Delhi Metro stations that were shuttered for three consecutive days reopened to the public. Pralhad Joshi has taken charge as the union Education Minister. Via: @JoshiPralhad on X The government accepted all three of CJP's non-negotiable demands: Pradhan's resignation, the withdrawal of FIRs filed against protesters, and a commitment to compensation for students affected by the NEET-UG paper leak. A follow-up round of talks between the government and CJP is scheduled in the coming weeks. Joshi, a five-time Member of Parliament from Karnataka's Dharwad constituency and a senior BJP leader, will hold the Education portfolio as an addit...

India's Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan submitted his resignation to Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Saturday. This marks the most significant political casualty of the student-led protest movement that has gripped the country for weeks. The resignation, which was the central demand of the Cockroach Janta Party since its founding, was submitted by letter.  File Photo Via: @dpradhanbjp Pradhan, who has served as Education Minister since July 2021, said in a statement posted on X: "The situation that has arisen at Jantar Mantar and in the country — anti-national forces should not take advantage of this situation. The unity of the country should be maintained. The future of even a single student of India should not get entangled in legal complications. Our children should spend their time in studies, focusing on building a career. Keeping this in mind, I have sent my resignation to the Honourable Prime Minister." (translation of the original Hindi letter) pic.t...

Delhi Police physically lifted and detained Rahul Gandhi, the Leader of the Opposition in Indian parliament's Lok Sabha , from a sit-in protest outside Prime Minister Narendra Modi 's official residence, as a crisis over irregularities in the country's national entrance examinations escalated into the most serious confrontation between the government and its opponents in years. Image Via: @RahulGandhi on X Rahul Gandhi, his sister and fellow Member of Parliament Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav were removed from the protest site at 7 Lok Kalyan Marg by Delhi Police and the Rapid Police Force after they refused to vacate. Officers were photographed and filmed carrying Rahul Gandhi bodily before placing him in a police vehicle. Reports confirmed by multiple outlets stated that the officers who detained the parliamentarians were not wearing nameboards on their uniforms. Gaand faad edit 🔥🔥 pic.twitter.com/NzLFhz7aTY — gulvinder (@rebelliousdo...

✍️ Written by Saket Suman Thousands of young Indians marched from Jantar Mantar toward Parliament in monsoon rain and were met with tear gas, lathi charges, internet shutdowns, and mass detentions. Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, was detained. Sonam Wangchuk, on the twenty-second day of a hunger strike that had already cost him at least 8.5 kilograms, wrote a handwritten note from his hospital bed requesting temporary release to join the march. The request was not granted. Image Via: @Cockroachisback on X The Education Minister did not resign. The Monsoon Session opened on schedule. The government held.  And yet something has happened today in Delhi that cannot be managed away with a press briefing. How We Got Here What began on May 15 as a Supreme Court judge's offhand comparison of unemployed youth to "cockroaches" became, within six weeks, one of the most significant youth mobilisations in India since the...