Delhi and Mumbai marches demand the election chief quit as police detain organisers

Protests demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar entered a third day on Sunday, with marches in Delhi and Mumbai and fresh detentions at India Gate. Reuters reported thousands of young protesters and opposition parties on the streets of both cities. The charge, repeated from the stage and from the pavement, is that the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls has struck eligible voters off the lists.

In Delhi, police detained more than 25 Aam Aadmi Party workers during a protest at India Gate, including Delhi unit chief Saurabh Bharadwaj and MLA Sanjeev Jha. A police officer told PTI that at least 25 were taken away. The demonstrators want Kumar out over the revision. The same demand brought a larger detention on Saturday, when officers stopped a march from Patel Chowk toward Jantar Mantar and held about 150 people, among them All India Students' Association president Neha Bora, Yogendra Yadav, Anjali Bharadwaj and Supreme Court advocate Prashant Bhushan.

What the capital put on the ground

Delhi Police had said it would deploy about 5,000 personnel for Sunday's marches, with drones and barricades on the India Gate to Jantar Mantar axis. Two processions were announced. One, described by organisers as a citizens' march, was set to leave India Gate at 3 p.m. and move to Jantar Mantar. The deployment is the state's reading of Saturday's number. A third day of the same route, after 150 detentions, is why the barricades went up before the crowd did.

Rahul Gandhi, leader of the opposition in the Lok Sabha, launched a digital platform he called Satyagraha, meant to map protest actions across the country. The platform does not itself file a legal challenge to the revision. It is a list. The legal argument, that the revision has disenfranchised eligible voters, is being made in the street and, separately, in petitions that have not produced a stay. Sunday's detentions do not decide that argument. They decide who spends the evening in a police station.

The Mumbai march

In Mumbai, Uddhav Thackeray led a march that started at Metro Cinema and covered the short distance to the BMC headquarters in south Mumbai. Congress and the NCP (Sharad Pawar) joined. Thackeray, after the walk, aimed his remarks at the prime minister's old industrial slogan, saying a government that talks of making in India should not, in his words, manufacture a dictator. Raj Thackeray has separately asked for the revision to be cancelled in Maharashtra. The cousins are not in the same party. They were in the same argument on Sunday.

The revision itself is a house-to-house check of the rolls, ordered by the Election Commission and defended by the commission as a clean-up of dead, shifted and duplicate names. Opposition parties say the deletions have fallen on their voters, and that the burden of proving residence has been pushed onto people who already hold a voter card. Neither side has published a full deletion list by booth that a reader can total. That missing table is why the protest has a name, Gyanesh Kumar, and a place, Jantar Mantar, and not yet a single national figure both sides accept.

Kerala politics added a second front the same day. Both the UDF and the LDF welcomed a vigilance probe linked to Kumar, a step that takes the argument out of the street and into a state anti-corruption file. It does not pause the revision. It does give parties that are not marching in Delhi a formal complaint to point at. West Bengal and Tamil Nadu were not the scene of Sunday's big walks. The geography of the third day was the capital and Mumbai, the two cities where opposition machines can still fill a short route.

The open item is the next hearing and the next roll. Detentions at India Gate do not restore a name to a list. A Satyagraha map does not either. The revision continues until the commission or a court stops it. Sunday showed that the opposition, the AAP in Delhi and the Thackeray-led march in Mumbai, will keep putting people on the road while that file is open.