Delhi police detain opposition MPs marching on the Election Commission

Police in Delhi detained opposition lawmakers on Tuesday as they tried to march on the Election Commission and demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Rahul Gandhi, his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, and other MPs were put on a police bus, released shortly after, and then sat down near the commission's headquarters after the route was blocked. Television channels said the Gandhi siblings later entered the grounds of the state radio office next door and sat under a tree.

The opposition said 237 MPs from several parties joined the march. Police did not give a detention figure. Officers had closed roads and set barricades around Nirvachan Sadan. Reuters reported that security forces used batons as lawmakers tried to pass the barriers. Some marchers carried placards calling Kumar a traitor and accusing the Bharatiya Janata Party of taking away the right to vote. At the barricades, Rahul Gandhi, Priyanka Gandhi and others stood with the national flag and repeated the demand that Kumar resign.

The dispute is over a special intensive revision of voter rolls. The commission began the exercise in Bihar in June 2025 and has since extended it. It says the revision is meant to remove duplicate and ineligible names. The BBC reported that more than 130 million names have been taken off draft lists nationwide. Congress and its allies say the cuts fall in a pattern that helps the BJP. The commission rejects that reading and treats the revision as a routine clean of the roll.

What 130 million names do to a roll

India's electorate is on the order of 950 million. A cut of more than 130 million from draft lists is not a rounding error, and it is not yet a final roll. Draft lists are published so that voters can object and so that the wrongly removed can apply to be restored. The political fight is over who has the time, the papers and the local officer's attention to get back on. A migrant worker deleted in a city where he no longer has a rent receipt is not in the same position as a voter whose family has the booth-level officer's phone number.

Tuesday's march is the parliamentary version of a row that has already left the House. Four days earlier the Cockroach Janta Party, a Gen Z online satire that has turned into street protests, held demonstrations in Mumbai and Delhi with the same demand, that Kumar resign. The MPs' march does not replace those protests. It puts the same demand on the road outside the commission, with a count of 237 lawmakers that the opposition can cite and a detention the police have not enumerated.

What the sit-in can and cannot force

A chief election commissioner does not leave office because a march reaches the gate. Removal sits with a process that looks like an impeachment, and the numbers for that are not on the opposition benches. The practical pressure is different. State elections and by-elections will be fought on the revised lists. If objections restore a large share of the 130 million, the opposition's charge shrinks. If the deletions stand, and if they cluster in constituencies the opposition needs, the charge becomes the campaign.

Kumar has not resigned. The commission has not published a booth-level account of who was removed and who has been restored. Until that account exists, Tuesday's scene outside Nirvachan Sadan is a dispute about a number the BBC put at more than 130 million and about a man the opposition wants out of the chair. The sit-in under the tree at the radio office is how the march ended on the day. The draft lists are how it will be scored.