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Delhi Police detained Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the Gen Z-led Cockroach Janta Party, along with co-leaders Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka shortly after their flight from Mumbai landed in the capital on Saturday, according to the group and multiple news outlets. The CJP claimed the three men were taken to an undisclosed location after officers boarded their plane, a development confirmed across BBC News, The Guardian and Al Jazeera reporting. In video footage shared by the movement, Dipke stated “This is dictatorship where Delhi police has entered in the flight and trying to arrest us.”
The detentions formed part of a broader preemptive operation in which Delhi Police said around 500 people were held as they converged on the city for the banned rally, a statement quoted by Deutsche Welle. Al Jazeera placed the total number of detentions above 1,000 and listed those held as including YouTuber Dhruv Rathee, senior lawyer Prashant Bhushan, politician Yogendra Yadav and several student and opposition figures. A Reuters source cited by The Guardian reported about 200 protesters detained in the Jantar Mantar vicinity alone while security forces patrolled the area.
The Cockroach Janta Party had planned the gathering at the Jantar Mantar landmark to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls, which the group alleges was manipulated to favour Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party. The Election Commission has denied the accusations, according to BBC News coverage of the dispute. Permission for the protest was refused and the action came months ahead of important state elections, with the unregistered movement also calling for wider changes to the voting system.
Tens of thousands of police and paramilitary personnel were deployed with roads barricaded, metro stations closed and mobile internet suspended within a four-kilometre radius of the protest zone, reports from BBC News, The Guardian and Al Jazeera detailed. Before boarding his flight, Dipke had told ANI that the threat of jail would not deter supporters. “If you think you can stop us by threatening us with jail or trying to intimidate us with the fear of imprisonment, you are mistaken. We are ready to go to jail,” he said, adding that the campaign for Kumar’s resignation would continue.
The movement originated in May after Chief Justice Surya Kant compared certain unemployed young people to “cockroaches” in a court hearing, a remark that Dipke initially used satirically before the group expanded to address unemployment, examination leaks and accountability, according to reporting by The Guardian and BBC News. An earlier July protest by the same movement over education reforms drew tens of thousands, resulted in clashes and contributed to the eventual resignation of the education minister, previous coverage by BBC News and The Independent recorded. The shift toward electoral issues reflects sustained youth frustration with governance questions in the run-up to further polls.
Protests and detentions were also reported in Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Srinagar as authorities moved to prevent travel to the capital, a dpa international dispatch noted. The Bharatiya Janata Party characterised the demonstrators as “anarchist forces” attempting to “hold India captive,” according to a BBC live blog recap. Some supporters resorted to wearing cockroach-antenna helmets or sheltering in a local gurdwara to avoid police, The Economic Times reported from the scene.
