The capital of the world’s largest democracy turned into a fortress Saturday, as an extraordinary show of force by Indian authorities met an equally extraordinary display of defiance by the country’s young.
Throughout the day, thousands of people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, tried to gather in Delhi to protest a sweeping revision of their country’s voter roll. Security forces hauled them away, sometimes grabbing them by their arms and legs, and stuffed them, often forcefully, into buses and vans.
Those detained banged on the doors of police vans. They shouted from the windows of buses. One police officer was seen grabbing a protester by the throat. By early evening, more than 2,000 people had been detained, according to a lawyers’ group providing legal aid to the detainees, though an exact number was impossible to ascertain.
The leaders of the Gen Z movement that called for the protest, the Cockroach Janta Party, said they, too, had been detained, including Abhijeet Dipke, one of the movement’s founders.
He shared a video of their encounter with police officers on Instagram. They were landing in Delhi on a flight from Mumbai after attending rallies in other cities earlier in the week, when police officers boarded the plane.
“You can see where the nation is heading. This is dictatorship,” he said. By Saturday evening, it was not known where they were being detained.
The Delhi police appeared to confirm that Mr. Dipke was in their custody. In a post on social media, they said they had offered “assistance” to help him travel home “on humanitarian grounds” after his grandmother’s death on Saturday.
The protest on Saturday followed a week of nationwide demonstrations demanding the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the head of India’s election commission, a body that was long held in high regard but has come under intense public criticism because of the revision of the national voter roll. That eliminated 130 million names, and critics say it is an effort directed by the government to entrench Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s power.
The protests, while focused on the voter roll issue, signal growing frustration with the government of Mr. Modi, who has been in power for 12 years. Mr. Modi has not commented on the protests.
A member of Parliament from the governing Bharatiya Janata Party, Ravi Shankar Prasad, on Saturday evening issued a scathing attack on the protests. “Indian democracy has destroyed the quest for anarchy,” he said. “The country will be run from the Parliament and not from the streets.”
The measures taken by security officials to prevent protesters gathering were highly unusual in a country that has long prided itself as a vibrant democracy. The heavy-handedness drew comparisons to the 1970s, when the prime minister at the time, Indira Gandhi, suspended the Constitution and jailed opposition leaders.
By Friday, the police had ordered the cancellation of trains bound for the capital and closed 45 metro stations in the city. Videos circulated online of would-be protesters being pulled from trains bound for Delhi in various parts of the country. Some youth activists were placed under effective house arrest days ahead of the protest. Mobile internet was shut in the center of the city, where the protest was to be held.
By early morning, hours before the protest was scheduled to begin at 10 a.m., security officials were out in full force, brandishing batons and shooing away small clusters of protesters.
“Aren’t we children of this nation?” asked Nada Haseen, 22, who had come with several fellow university students to protest, only to be met by a blockade of yellow police barriers. “We are asking for our basic right, to vote.”
They were undeterred. Tanmay Koli, 20, rode a train for two days by himself to come to his nation’s capital. He found his way to a Sikh temple to sit for a while and eat. Then he headed out into the streets of New Delhi with two other young men, who, like him, had come by train from their own hometowns far away.
On Saturday, the three of them, strangers until just a few hours ago, sat together on a curb staring at barricades and a phalanx of security forces. They were nervous, they said, but they wanted to be here.
“They’re stealing votes,” Mr. Koli, said. He had come from Pune, a city to the south.
“Democracy is not safe,” said his new friend, a 28-year-old man who, fearing reprisal, gave only his first name, Om. He had traveled from Chandigarh, a city to the north.
Delhi police said Friday they had denied permission for the Cockroach Janta Party-led protest at Jantar Mantar, the 18th-century monument that is a designated protest site. Police said they had not asked for permission sufficiently early.
In Connaught Place, a shopping and restaurant hub, detained protesters in police vans rolled past a tricolor Indian flag, flying high behind them, and a statue of Gandhi’s spinning wheel, a symbol of India’s nonviolent independence movement.
A group of lawyers, dressed in their signature black and white garb, set out to march from the Supreme Court and a nearby district court, holding copies of the Indian Constitution; 400 of them were soon detained, according to Utkarsh Sinha, a lawyer who attended the demonstrations. From a Sikh house of worship near Jantar Mantar, a small group of protesters set off; several were plucked off by police, and many others sprinted away.
By midday, when it became abundantly clear that there would be no gathering at Jantar Mantar, another group, including by a prominent student activist named Neha Bora, began marching from a market nearly six miles away. She too was detained.
Throughout the afternoon, spontaneous protests erupted, some with a handful of people, others with hundreds.
All the detainees were taken away from the city center and held in various places, including a meeting hall and a stadium, before being taken to several police stations around the city, according to several of the detainees.
Lawyers groups fanned out across the city to help the detained at police stations. Others organized caravans of cars to retrieve detainees and bring them home. Some of them were also detained.
Ajinkya Shinde, a Cockroach Janta Party leader, issued a video message on behalf of the other leaders who had been detained. He urged people to continue protesting even if they were prevented from reaching the designated protest site, Jantar Mantar, “Wherever you are stopped, turn that place into Jantar Mantar.”
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