Modi government carries out preventive detention of thousands to obstruct protests over election dispute; New Delhi locked down across the city

A Delhi administrative magistrate's court ordered the release of three leaders of the "Rashtriya Cockroach Party" (CJP, also known as the "Cockroach Youth Movement") on Sunday, temporarily drawing a line under a crackdown centered on preventive detention and reinforced by a citywide lockdown. According to Al Jazeera, at least 2,000 protesters, opposition politicians and journalists were detained in the operation over the previous day.

According to Al Jazeera, CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and his associates Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka were taken into police custody aboard the aircraft on which they had flown from Mumbai to New Delhi on Saturday. In a video posted on Instagram, Dipke bade farewell to fellow passengers: "It was lovely meeting all of you. We can see where this country is heading. This is dictatorship — Delhi Police boarded the plane and tried to arrest us." The three were released by the court on Sunday. Defense counsel Ratna Singh said on social media that the condition of release was "not to breach public order for one year."

The scale of the police operation went far beyond the CJP leadership. Television footage showed that former West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal and former Kerala chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan were among those detained. A Reuters journalist and four digital media journalists were also briefly taken into custody.

Estimates of the number of people arrested varied. The Hindu, citing Delhi Police sources, said about 2,500 people had been detained in the capital; Reuters, citing a Home Ministry official, put the number at roughly 2,000; ANI separately reported that about 600 more people had been arrested in the financial center Mumbai.

CJP had planned to gather thousands of people at Jantar Mantar, the designated protest site in central New Delhi, to demonstrate against Election Commission chief commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Protesters demanded Kumar's resignation on the grounds that the "Special Intensive Revision" (SIR) of the voter rolls he had pushed through had removed roughly 130 million names; the opposition accused the revision of benefiting the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). According to Al Jazeera, Kumar himself did not comment, and both the Election Commission and the BJP denied any wrongdoing. But the Indian Express revealed last week that two election commissioners had questioned the revision.

To prevent the protest from taking place, mobile communications services were suspended in central New Delhi's commercial district and dozens of metro stations and markets were shut. Police set up checkpoints on major roads and at the city's entry points, boarding and inspecting buses and vehicles, and riot-control vehicles fitted with tear-gas launchers were deployed on key routes. According to Al Jazeera, Jantar Mantar was sealed off by security forces before the demonstration began.

Nonetheless, small-scale protests broke out at other locations in New Delhi. At the handicrafts market Dilli Haat, Shranaya, a New Delhi state committee member of the left-wing student organization All India Students' Federation (SFI), told Al Jazeera: "This is living, breathing dictatorship — right in front of our eyes — just to protect one bureaucrat who steals votes for BJP on behalf of Modi. They are murdering India's democracy in broad daylight." She added: "This government does not know the power of the people, and that is our strength. We have no weapons, but we have passion. We will take to the streets again, and we will keep coming back. We are students. We are the unemployed. We are the 'cockroaches' — and we will return." She was dragged away by police and put on a bus after climbing over a barricade.

The international community responded swiftly. Thameen Al-Kheetan, a spokesperson for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, issued a statement calling on the authorities to "fully respect and protect the right to peaceful assembly" and urging "meaningful dialogue" to address "widespread" concerns. Amnesty International warned that the detentions showed the Indian government's "desperate attempt" to "silence critical voices," while the Committee to Protect Journalists demanded that Indian police "respect journalists."

India's Permanent Mission to the United Nations in Geneva countered that the concerns were "misguided," amounted to "unwarranted interference in India's internal affairs," and stressed that the right to peaceful assembly was guaranteed by the Indian Constitution, adding that "as in every democracy, the exercise of that right by Indian citizens is subject to reasonable restrictions for the maintenance of public order."

Indian National Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge wrote on the social media platform X: "The Modi government has turned the 'Mother of Democracy' into a 'Silenced Democracy'! Detention, arrests, imprisonment, batons and pellets cannot frighten the Indian people." BJP spokesperson Sambit Patra, for his part, branded the protesters "anarchists," saying that "their failed drama has been thoroughly shattered."

Sanjay Kapoor, editor-in-chief of Hard News magazine, told Al Jazeera that it was "very strange" that the Modi government "should appear so panicked and fearful about the situation that protesters might create." "The fact is that the BJP and the central government are very, very afraid of how things will develop," he said, "The Modi government has begun to lose a great deal of credibility. The BJP is worried that the situation on the ground has fundamentally changed and that they will find it extremely difficult to return to power."

The crackdown comes ahead of a series of important state elections in early 2027, underscoring that the voter roll controversy has become one of the gravest political tests facing the Modi government.