Madhya Pradesh police take protesters off trains ahead of Saturday's Delhi march

Madhya Pradesh police took protesters off trains at Bhopal, Itarsi and Gwalior on Friday, a day before a march planned for Delhi. A senior officer said at least 30 people had been removed and detained, and were being counselled to go back to their home states. The railways cancelled trains into New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin, citing congestion from the Saturday protest. Fifty-seven metro stations in the capital are to shut from 9 p.m. Friday.

The protest, called by opposition parties and civil society groups, is aimed at Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and is due at Jantar Mantar on 10 October. Aam Aadmi Party convenor Arvind Kejriwal asked people to attend. He said he would go with his family. The detentions on the trains are not in Delhi. They are on the approach, at three Madhya Pradesh junctions that feed the lines into the capital.

Bhopal, Itarsi and Gwalior are the practical map. Itarsi is the junction where north-south and east-west lines cross. A group pulled off there does not reappear two hours later at Hazrat Nizamuddin. Gwalior is the last large station before the capital on the western main line. Bhopal is the state headquarters, and the place a state police force can hold people it has decided should not continue. The officer's account, given to the Indian Express, is that the 30 are being counselled to return. Counselling, in this usage, is detention plus a direction. It is not an arrest figure with sections attached. The Express did not name charges.

The railway order is the larger instrument. Cancelling trains that terminate at New Delhi and Hazrat Nizamuddin empties the two stations opposition groups would use, and it hits every other passenger on those services. The congestion rationale is the one the railways have used for earlier capital protests. A cancelled train is easier to defend than a cordon at the platform, and it moves the disruption out of the city. The metro closure, 57 stations from 9 p.m., is the city's own version of the same idea: shrink the network before the march, not during it.

Saturday's gathering sits in a row of challenges to the Commission. Opposition MPs have talked of marching to Rashtrapati Bhavan over the special intensive revision of rolls. Friday's train detentions are about bodies, not about the revision's rules. The Commission has not, in the reports of the detentions, issued a statement on the march. Kejriwal's appeal is the political invitation. The police action on the trains is the state's answer, delivered one state short of the venue.

The timing also sits against a counting day. Six assembly bypolls are being tallied on Friday, including two in West Bengal that are the first test of the new BJP government there. A capital protest called for the morning after a count is a standard opposition move. Stopping the trains on Friday afternoon is the matching administrative move. Neither decides the bypolls. Together they set Saturday's street picture: a thinner rail service, a partly closed metro, and a Jantar Mantar call that Kejriwal has said he will answer in person.

What a reader in Bhopal can check is local. Thirty people, three stations, counselling to return, trains to the two Delhi terminals cancelled, 57 metro stations dark from 9 p.m. The march is still called for Saturday. Whether the 30 stay in Madhya Pradesh or find another way in is the open fact. The junctions have already been used once. A second attempt would have to avoid Itarsi, Gwalior and Bhopal, which is a hard route into Delhi by rail.