The Indian police turned New Delhi into a fortress on Saturday as protesters tried to assemble in the city center to oppose a sweeping revision of the nation’s voter roll. The authorities took extraordinary measures to stop them.
A large number of officers have gathered and have erected tall yellow barricades around the protest site. Several protesters have already been placed under house arrest. Delhi-bound trains have been canceled. Officials ordered the closure of 45 metro stations.
The protests were called by a Gen Z movement known as the Cockroach Janta Party. The demonstrations follow a week of daily protests by opposition politicians and several activist groups who are expected defy a police ban and join Saturday’s rally.
Here’s what to know about the events in New Delhi, the capital of the world’s most populous democracy.
What are the protests about?
The protests stem from growing anger at a sweeping revision of the voter roll. The change, known as the Special Intensive Revision, began last summer as an effort to verify voter eligibility and remove duplicate or ineligible names. The government called it a long overdue push to clean up voter records.
It required Indians to submit multiple documents to prove that they were eligible to vote, and it ended up eliminating 130 million names. Critics said it had removed legitimate voters and forced people identified as dead to come forward to prove that they were indeed alive.
Critics have called the measure a politically motivated purge that could entrench the tenure of Prime Minister Narenda Modi, who has been in power for 12 years.
Leaders of Mr. Modi’s party reject the criticism. The home minister, Amit Shah, accused opposition lawmakers of “lies and disinformation” in a social media post. “Having lost their public support, these parties question institutions after every defeat,” he said.
What do the protesters want?
The protesters say their goal is to ensure free and fair elections.
They have demanded the resignation of the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar; an immediate halt to the voter roll revision pending an independent inquiry; and the restoration of the previous voter roll in coming elections.
A popular slogan by the Gen Z movement refers to the election chief by a diminutive form of his first name: “Gyanu. It’s done, bro.”
The anger at the election chief has been aggravated by news, reported by The Indian Express newspaper, that other officials within the election commission and the Supreme Court had expressed reservations about the exercise.
Who are the protesters?
The protest was initially organized by the Cockroach Janta Party, a Gen Z movement that emerged this summer to decry a broken college entrance exam system. They won the rare ouster of a government minister.
Several groups said they would join the Saturday rally. They include farmers groups that led protests in 2020 against the government’s proposed agricultural reforms. They too marched toward central Delhi and faced a crackdown, but pushed the government to back down.
The opposition Aam Aadmi party, with which some Cockroach Party leaders had been involved, has also said that it planned to join, along with several leftist youth organizations. Those include the All India Students’ Association, affiliated with one of the country’s communist parties, whose members have led some of the most robust protests this week.
What’s at stake?
First, the irregularities in the voter roll revision has dented the reputation of the election commission, which for years had been seen as a credible institution that ran relatively fair elections.
Second, the protests reflect the force of the Gen Z Cockroach movement, which has been led by a handful of young people with no political experience and all under the age of 32. Their success regarding the college entrance system seems to have emboldened others both in the movement and outside it to speak out against the Modi administration.
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