India: Leader of the ‘cockroaches’ protesting against Modi released

Whilst the focus of Friday’s march was the release of Ranka and Das, the campaign waged by the CJP over recent weeks is far more ambitious. Having secured the resignation of the Minister for Education last July, the protest movement is now calling for the resignation of the Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, the senior civil servant who oversees the electoral system of the world’s most populous country.

The Election Commission of India has been at the centre of controversy for months due to its Special Intensive Revision, a contentious operation to ‘clean up’ the electoral roll that was hastily launched on the eve of a busy election cycle.

To date, more than 130 million names have been removed from the electoral rolls. Some of these are voters who have died or have been erroneously counted more than once; others are people whom the Electoral Commission has asked to provide documents that are not always easy to obtain, having long refused – until the intervention of the Supreme Court – to accept other commonly used forms of identification. There are already millions of appeals.

The opposition accuses the Electoral Commission of having rigged the most recent election results, by excluding from the vote millions of Muslim citizens and members of the working classes – two traditional constituencies of the Gandhi family’s Indian National Congress. Prime Minister Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), on the other hand, accuses the opposition of seeking to undermine Indian democracy by calling into question its proper functioning.

“Please spare the Indian people. Bring charges against Gyanesh Kumar and suspend the Special Intensive Revision, so that ordinary citizens of this country can breathe a sigh of relief, feel more at ease and have their right to vote guaranteed,” said Bora, the student leader, after her release.

Given the link between the Election Commission of India and the government (which, in 2023, disregarded the Supreme Court’s instructions in order to be able to appoint its own members), the protests against Kumar quickly took on a political dimension, becoming the catalyst for the anger felt by a section of the electorate towards Modi and his government.

“Do you see those men in uniform?” asks Suruchi Khurana, 33, who works in marketing, pointing to the paramilitary units deployed on Friday in central Delhi. “They’re not here to protect us citizens, but to protect him. We, on the other hand, are out here demanding that the Electoral Commission be held to account for its actions. And we won’t stop until it does.”