NEW DELHI: At least 10,000 people have been detained across the country ahead of the Cockroach Janta Party’s (CJP) planned protest at Jantar Mantar in Delhi on October 10, the party’s spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka claimed on Friday.The CJP said those detained included students from Pune who were travelling to Delhi to participate in the protest. According to the party, the students were being taken away in a bus to an unknown location.CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke questioned the restrictions on the planned demonstration, responding to a video of activists being detained with the remark: “Why not just declare EMERGENCY?” (sic)“At least 10000 people have been detained across the country across (Cockroach Janta Party), various student orgs, Kisaan and Dalit Sangathans, political parties. THIS IS EMERGENCY,” Ranka said in a post on X. (sic)Among those detained was national spokesperson Deepak Baliyan, who was taken into police custody on Thursday and released later that night, the party said.The detentions came ahead of the CJP’s planned march to Jantar Mantar to demand the scrapping of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls and accountability for the alleged deletion of voters.Dipke had called for a nationwide mobilisation against the exercise, saying the protest would proceed even if the party’s leaders were detained or arrested.Addressing a press conference on Thursday, he criticised restrictions on public gatherings in the national capital and questioned why protests could be held in Mumbai and Bengaluru but not in Delhi.“Jantar Mantar belongs to people of India, it does not belong to Union Home Minister Amit Shah,” he said.“If Mumbai and Bengaluru can have peaceful protests, why is Amit Shah not allowing it in Delhi?” the CJP founder asked.Dipke urged political parties, civil society groups and social activists to unite to protect voting rights. He alleged that large numbers of voters had been deleted from electoral rolls and questioned the Election Commission’s role in the exercise.“SIR is the biggest scam that the central government, the BJP-ruled government, is pulling off to kill democracy in India,” he said.Referring to testimonies of people allegedly declared dead in electoral records despite producing Aadhaar, PAN and other valid documents to establish that they were alive, Dipke questioned how living voters could be marked dead and removed from the rolls.He alleged that the BJP and the Election Commission were working together to delete the votes of people who did not support the ruling party. The Election Commission’s role and the allegations made by the CJP could not be independently established from the party’s claims.Dipke also cited alleged deletions in constituencies associated with opposition leaders, including former West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, Tamil Nadu chief minister M K Stalin and former Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal. He questioned whether the cases were coincidental or pointed to a pattern.“If we believe that there is no involvement of the BJP with the Election Commission, then why is it always the opposition leaders who lose? And why does it always benefit the BJP?” he asked.He described the process as “unconstitutional”, arguing that it undermined the principle that people should choose their government rather than the government determining who could vote.“The government is selecting who will be the voter and who will not vote,” he said.The CJP founder said the October 10 march would seek to hold Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the Centre accountable for the alleged deletion of votes. He also urged Delhi Police to learn from Karnataka Police how to protect people’s rights.Dipke criticised PM Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah, saying they did not own the country or Jantar Mantar and were only “servants with a fixed tenure to serve people”.He said the party was not seeking to destabilise the country but wanted accountability over the alleged electoral irregularities.CJP spokesperson Saurav Das alleged that party members and young participants in the movement were facing “mass detentions” in several states, including Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal and Delhi.“None of us are afraid of arrests or detentions. The protest has to go on with or without us,” he said.Actor Prakash Raj, who addressed a gathering in Bengaluru earlier, said civil society organisations in Karnataka had spent nearly a year documenting alleged irregularities in the SIR exercise and had presented their findings in different parts of the country.He said testimonies presented at a tribunal, including those of people allegedly declared dead in electoral records, showed that the issue extended beyond Karnataka.Raj appealed to the media to focus on SIR and expressed solidarity with young protesters travelling to Delhi for the October 10 demonstration. He said Karnataka’s civil society groups also supported them.He added that the movement had grown from a Karnataka-based campaign into a broader national struggle, thanking the organisations and young activists involved in documenting alleged irregularities and bringing affected voters before the tribunal.(With inputs from PTI)
