Delhi police detain Cockroach Janata protesters demanding Gyanesh Kumar resign

Delhi police detained protesters on Saturday at a second day of demonstrations demanding that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar resign. About 100 people pulled down security barricades, a Reuters witness said, and chanted "vote thief, leave the post" and "Gyanesh Kumar, step down". Police would not give a number or a list of those held.

Independent MP Kapil Sibal, All India Students' Association president Neha Bora, and activists Prashant Bhushan and Yogendra Yadav were in the crowd, Reuters reported. Bora told the agency: "First they removed people from the voters list and now they are not letting us raise our voice against this." Kumar has not answered the resignation calls.

The organising name is the Cockroach Janata Party, also styled Cockroach Janta Party, a Gen Z-led group that began online and moved into the street this year. In July its protests were part of the pressure that led India's education minister to resign. Friday's action was in Mumbai, where the Associated Press described hundreds of supporters demanding the same resignation, while police in Delhi stopped a separate gathering at Jantar Mantar and detained dozens, including some opposition figures. Saturday in the capital was the follow-through, not the start.

The grievance is the special intensive revision of voter rolls, a nationwide check the Election Commission says is meant to remove duplicate, dead and ineligible names. Critics, including opposition parties, say eligible voters have been struck off in numbers large enough to tilt the lists toward the Bharatiya Janata Party. The commission's reply has been the purpose of the exercise, not a published count of restorations. That missing count is why the street demand is a resignation rather than a corrected roll. Protesters are treating the revision as a result they cannot audit.

Saturday's mechanics are ordinary Delhi protest policing, and the names make it less ordinary. Sibal is a sitting independent member of Parliament. Bhushan and Yadav have been on election-integrity cases for years. Bora runs a left student union. A detention that includes that mix is harder for the commission to file as a campus action. The Cockroach group supplies the younger bodies. The older names supply the legal and parliamentary echo.

The commission has been, for most of the republic, one of the few referees both sides cited. Kumar's silence on Saturday leaves the field to the chant and to the police note that declined to say who was held. Opposition parties have already said the revision favours Narendra Modi's government after 12 years in office. The commission says the revision is a cleaning of the list. Between those two sentences there is still no public table of how many names were cut in each state, how many objections were filed, and how many were restored.

Until that table exists, the verifiable Saturday facts are the crowd of about 100, the barricades, the four named participants, the chants, the police refusal to count detentions, and a commissioner who has not replied. Friday in Mumbai and the blocked Jantar Mantar sit immediately behind them. The education minister's July resignation is the precedent the organisers are pointing at.