Police halt the INDIA bloc short of the Election Commission; Gandhi tells Kumar to resign

INDIA bloc MPs left Parliament's Makar Dwar at about 11am on Tuesday and walked toward Nirvachan Sadan. Police stopped them on Parliament Street in front of the NITI Aayog office, on the stretch between NITI Aayog and Akashvani Bhavan, short of the Election Commission headquarters. The MPs sat on the road. Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, posted: "Gyanesh, it's done, bro. Time to resign."

Mallikarjun Kharge walked with him. So did Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Akhilesh Yadav, Abhishek Banerjee, Derek O'Brien, John Brittas and Supriya Sule. Marchers carried cutouts of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar drawn in an RSS uniform and raised three slogans that PTI recorded: "BJP hai CEC hai", "Vote chor, gaddi chhod" and "Democracy not for sale". The sit-in was the first street move by the alliance since a three-judge bench led by Chief Justice Surya Kant said on Monday that the Supreme Court had never approved a modified Form 6.

What Form 6 is, and what the court said

Form 6 is the statutory application a person uses to ask for inclusion on the electoral roll for the first time. The Election Commission attached a declaration to the form used in the Special Intensive Revision. A 26 September press release from the commission said, among other things, that the declaration had been upheld by the Supreme Court. Gandhi posted that release on Monday night and wrote that it was now "established beyond doubt" that Kumar had "changed Form 6 illegally and unilaterally". He called the release "one more proof" of Kumar "abusing his position to help BJP" and said everyone involved in what he called a criminal assault on democracy would be held accountable.

The court's remark does not, by itself, strike the form down. It does remove the commission's ability to point to a judicial nod that the bench says was never given. That is the narrow legal point the march is built on. The political demand is wider: resignation of the chief election commissioner, and a halt to the revision as the opposition has described it.

Why the stop matters

The march never reached the commission's gate. Stopping it at NITI Aayog puts the protest on a road that television cameras already cover for Parliament sessions, and it keeps the MPs inside a zone the Delhi Police treat as an extension of the House complex. A sit-in there is harder to dismiss as a rally in a distant park, and easier for the government to frame as a blockade of a working street. Opposition MPs had already questioned the security layout before they stepped out.

The same dispute produced a separate set of arrests on Monday. Delhi Police picked up 17 students and freelance journalists at a Jantar Mantar protest against Kumar. Judicial Magistrate Animesh Kumar at Patiala House granted them bail between 9pm and 9:25pm, after the police asked for two weeks of judicial remand. The magistrate said assaulting an officer on duty could not be dressed up as a peaceful protest, noted that one officer had an injury recorded on a medico-legal certificate, and still released the group on bonds of Rs 15,000 with one surety. He said the accused were young and did not look like habitual offenders. Section 132 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, the charge he singled out, carries a maximum of two years.

The calendar behind the noise

Petitions already before the Supreme Court cite 14 SIR decisions taken between October 2025 and August 2026. The bench has issued notices to the Election Commission, the Centre, and election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi. It has refused to suspend Kumar. That split, a refusal to remove the commissioner and a refusal to bless the form, is what the opposition is now reading in public as a resignation case.

Tuesday is also the last day for nominations in the Uttar Pradesh Rajya Sabha election, which is why Yadav was in the capital at all. The Samajwadi Party has filed for Ram Gopal Yadav and Reliance executive Dhanraj Parimal Nathwani and, by midday, had said it would not field a third name. The BJP on Monday dropped sitting members Hardeep Singh Puri and B.L. Verma and named eight replacements. Scrutiny is on 7 October, withdrawal closes on 9 October, and polling is on 16 October. The Form 6 fight and the Upper House calendar are running on the same week.

The commission has not issued a fresh reply to Gandhi's post as of Tuesday morning. Until it does, the operative text on the government side remains the 26 September release, and the operative text on the court side remains the chief justice's sentence that no modified Form 6 had been approved. The MPs on Parliament Street are treating those two documents as a contradiction. The next move that changes the file is either a written clarification from Nirvachan Sadan or a further order from the bench.