Thousands March In Delhi In Protest Led By Rahul Gandhi, Opposition Leaders
India-West News Desk
NEW DELHI – Thousands of protesters, NDTV, owned by Gautam Adani, reported, joined Rahul Gandhi, Neha Bora, Akhilesh Yadav and Tejashwi Yadav in central Delhi on mOctober 12 as opposition leaders marched toward the Supreme Court to challenge Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged electoral irregularities and the revision of voter rolls.
The successful march, organized by the INDIA opposition bloc under the banner ‘Chalo Delhi: March for Democracy,’ began with Rahul Gandhi, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha, leading the procession alongside his sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra and All India Students’ Association chief Neha Bora. Thousands of supporters and opposition leaders followed.
Gandhi called for sustained public mobilization, saying that opposition to the Election Commission’s actions had existed previously but had not produced street protests on the current scale. Protecting democratic institutions, he said, would require patience and persistence rather than an expectation of immediate change.
Police halted the march after a short distance. Gandhi was later seen standing atop a truck alongside Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav and Rashtriya Janata Dal leader Tejashwi Yadav as demonstrators gathered around the vehicle.
The street mobilization coincided with a legal challenge against Kumar over allegations of ‘vote chori,’ or vote theft. Gandhi subsequently reached the Supreme Court to pursue an interim stay on the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.
At a press conference at Congress headquarters before the march, Gandhi said opposition lawmakers wanted to submit a memorandum outlining their concerns about Kumar and the electoral roll revision, but Chief Justice of India Surya Kant declined to meet them.
Gandhi displayed a letter he and Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge had sent to the Chief Justice detailing their concerns about the election chief’s alleged conduct and the contentious SIR exercise. Gandhi said Kant had advised them to approach the court through a petition.
NDTV reported that Gandhi urged citizens across party lines to join the demonstration, arguing that the dispute extended beyond the interests of individual politicians or political parties to the future of Indian democracy. Those unable to attend in person, he said, should express their support from wherever they were.
The latest demonstration followed a week of opposition protests in the capital, during which several senior leaders, including Gandhi, were briefly detained.
Meanwhile, the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) said October 11 that its protests would continue until the chief election commissioner stepped down. The group had called for a march to Jantar Mantar on October 10, the designated protest site where earlier demonstrations over the electoral revision had taken place.
The planned mobilization was met with extensive and unprecedented security restrictions that effectively locked down the capital. Hundreds of train services were canceled, dozens of metro stations were shut, and thousands of police and paramilitary personnel were deployed across Delhi, making it difficult for protesters to reach the demonstration site.
CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and co-convenors Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka were detained aboard a plane after arriving in Delhi to lead the protest. They were released the following day. Dipke subsequently returned home to attend his grandmother’s funeral, while Das and Ranka held a press conference reaffirming the group’s intention to continue its campaign.
Neither Das nor Ranka joined the October 11 opposition demonstrations.
The CJP had previously led a protest campaign over the summer that culminated in the resignation of India’s education minister.
Police detained and later released thousands of people over the weekend, including several journalists. Videos and photographs from the demonstrations showed officers forcibly moving protesters, including women, and pushing them into buses.
