Delhi police halt the INDIA bloc march; Rahul Gandhi sits in at Akashvani Bhawan

INDIA bloc MPs left Parliament at 11:10 a.m. on Tuesday and marched toward the Election Commission to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Delhi Police stopped the column in front of the NITI Aayog office. By early afternoon Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra were inside the Akashvani Bhawan compound, next to the commission, after the gate had been shut and Rahul had climbed a barricade. About 20 MPs, including Akhilesh Yadav, Abhishek Banerjee, Kalyan Banerjee, Derek O'Brien, Imran Masood, P. Santosh and A. Rahim, were detained and taken to police stations. Congress workers were also picked up on Parliament Street.

The demand is tied to the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls. Opposition leaders say names have been deleted and that the clean-up amounts to vote theft. Rahul Gandhi wrote on X: "Gyanesh, it's done bro. Time to resign." He said it was established that Kumar had changed Form 6 illegally and on his own. At the sit-in he asked why the commission would not meet them. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, who joined the march, said the agitation would go on to protect the vote and freedom, and that voters were reporting deletions.

Form 6 is the practical centre of the legal argument, not the slogan. It is the application used to enter a new voter on the roll. The opposition says the commission altered it without authority. The Supreme Court, in a related observation carried by the Indian Express live file, said it had not approved any modified Form 6 and would look at the commission's records to see whether the form was changed and who authorised the change. That is a narrower question than the resignation demand. It is also a question with a paper trail: versions of the form, the date of any edit, and the order behind it.

The revision itself has a second, administrative complaint. In West Bengal, tribunals dealing with deletions have said glitches on the commission's portal stopped them serving notices, holding hearings, or restoring names. A portal failure and a disputed form are different faults. Both sit under the same exercise. The commission has called Rahul Gandhi's Form 6 claim misleading, according to a CNBC-TV18 report on Tuesday afternoon. It has not, in the accounts used here, published a side-by-side of the old and new forms.

Manickam Tagore, a Congress MP, put the number who joined the march at 237. BJD leaders appeared at the protest in the early afternoon. Roads in central Delhi were closed at the main junctions. The sequence from the Express timestamps runs from the 11:10 start, to a dharna at 11:22 after the first halt, to Kharge's arrival at 11:39, to detentions of Priyanka and other MPs around 12:11, to Rahul and Priyanka entering Akashvani Bhawan at 12:46. At 2:29 p.m. they were still inside, with Pawan Khera, Charanjit Singh Channi and Deepender Hooda.

What the day changes is the venue of the SIR fight. It was a committee argument and a court file. It is now a detention list and a sit-in next to the commission's office. The resignation of Gyanesh Kumar is a political demand. The Form 6 versions are a record the Supreme Court has said it will examine. Those are not the same outcome. A reader who wants the next verifiable step should watch for the form the court asks to see, and for whether the Bengal tribunals get a working portal, not only for whether the sit-in is cleared overnight.