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India’s Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) has vowed to continue its campaign demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, accusing the government of detaining opposition activists out of fear of the protests.
The party alleged that Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah had turned a movement against the Election Commission into a campaign against themselves, warning that “the fight has just begun”.
CJP co-convenor Ashutosh Ranka made the remarks at a news conference on Sunday, hours after being released by a Delhi court following preventive detention.
“The country has witnessed extreme authoritarianism over the past 72 hours. Thousands of peaceful protesters who wanted to demonstrate at designated locations have been detained across the country,” Ranka said.
Blaming Modi and Shah for the situation, he alleged that the party’s leaders had been “abducted” from an aircraft the previous day.
Comparing the security measures in Delhi with the Emergency imposed in India in 1975, Ranka said the events of the past 72 hours had surpassed even the accounts of that period he had heard from his parents.
He accused the Election Commission of failing to protect and strengthen democracy and instead working under the direction of the prime minister and home minister to help the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) win elections. The Election Commission and the BJP have denied allegations of bias.
Ranka also accused Delhi Police of insensitivity over the death of the grandmother of CJP founder Abhijit Dipak. He alleged that police personnel arrived with cameras and microphones after Dipak received the news, turning a moment of personal grief into a spectacle, despite repeated requests to allow him to speak with his family.
Dipak said before the news conference that he was travelling to his ancestral village in Maharashtra to attend his grandmother’s funeral. He vowed that the party would not retreat or be intimidated by threats.
Expressing condolences, Ranka said the party stood beside Dipak during his bereavement.
The CJP also thanked opposition leaders, including Arvind Kejriwal, Mamata Banerjee, Manik Sarkar and Pinarayi Vijayan, for joining students and young people in the protests. Ranka alleged that members of left-wing student organisations, including the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) and the All India Students’ Association (AISA), had been detained harshly.
In a post on social media platform X, Dipak said neither he nor the party’s leadership had given the government any written undertaking to refrain from protesting. He said the party would soon return to the streets to press its demands against the chief election commissioner.
The dispute centres on the Election Commission’s nationwide voter-list revision exercise. The commission says the process is intended to remove the names of deceased people, duplicate registrations and ineligible voters as part of routine electoral maintenance.
Opposition parties and the CJP, however, allege that large numbers of eligible voters have been excluded. According to a BBC report cited in the original account, nearly 130 million names have so far been removed from voter lists, with people in several states alleging wrongful deletions.
The CJP and opposition parties accuse Kumar of favouring the ruling BJP in the revision process. Both the commission and the BJP have rejected the allegations.
On Saturday, the CJP called a protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi demanding Kumar’s resignation over alleged irregularities in the electoral process. Young people travelled to the capital from different parts of India to join the demonstration, following which authorities carried out mass detentions, the party alleged.
