The three leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party, a popular youth movement in India, were released from detention on Sunday, a day after police officers took them into custody as they were preparing to lead a protest against sweeping revisions of the nation’s voter roll.
Ratna Singh, a Cockroach leader who acts as the group’s legal director, said on social media that the three leaders had been released on the condition that they commit “no breach of peace for one year.”
It was not immediately clear whether that condition essentially amounted to a gag order. Nor was it known whether the leaders — Abhijeet Dipke, who created the Cockroach movement, along with Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka — would appear at a second day of protests that their party and other activist groups called for on Sunday. The group said it would hold a news conference on Sunday afternoon.
The three men waved to journalists assembled outside the police station as they were swiftly loaded into a black vehicle and driven away. Mr. Dipke was seen wearing the same T-shirt he had on Saturday — bearing an image of Mohandas K. Gandhi, India’s leader of nonviolent protest.
“Cockroaches never die,” the group’s X account declared, minutes after their release. It included a cockroach emoji.
The detention of the three men on Saturday was part of an extraordinary show of force by Indian security officials, who rounded up thousands of would-be protesters and stuffed them into buses and vans. Trains to the capital were canceled, subway stations were closed and the internet was shut down in much of New Delhi.
Undeterred, thousands of people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, held rallies in several parts of the city, only to face walls of security forces.
The protests are in response to what the Cockroach party and others have called a politically motivated purge of the voter roll. That revision, which began last summer to update the voter roll, has expunged over 130 million names. One of the protesters’ central demands is the resignation of the country’s election chief, Gyanesh Kumar.
For more than a week, anger over the voter roll revision has fueled protests by a range of Indian organizations and opposition politicians.
The three cockroach leaders were picked up in a dramatic show of force on Saturday morning, when police officers boarded the plane on which they had flown to the capital. The men shared the video of their encounter with the police on social media.
They were detained under a law that allows the police to arrest preventively — without a warrant — those who they believe would commit an offense, in order to maintain public order.
A Delhi magistrate ordered their released 24 hours later.
The Delhi police said on social media on Sunday, after the men’s release, that “all due legal procedures were followed.”
The police station where they had been held overnight was heavily fortified by law enforcement officers as New Delhi braced for more demonstrations to come.
The Cockroach party emerged this summer on the backs of Gen Z anger over a dysfunctional system for college entrance exams in India. (The group’s name is a tongue-in-cheek response to a comment that India’s top judge made last May, calling young Indians “cockroaches.”)
Protests led by the Cockroach party won the rare ouster of a government minister in July, after which the group worked to call attention to the poor conditions in India’s rural schools. In September, it seized on the voter roll revision.
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