Indian police detain opposition MPs at voter roll protest in Delhi

Police in Delhi detained several opposition lawmakers on 6 October as they marched towards the Election Commission headquarters to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Main opposition leader Rahul Gandhi of the Congress party, his sister Priyanka Gandhi and other MPs were forced into a police bus, according to the BBC. They were released shortly after, resumed the march and began a sit-in near the commission's headquarters.

Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police Manjeet Sheoran told the BBC that officers were stationed at multiple points and protesters were picked up in buses and taken to different police stations. The police did not disclose how many lawmakers were detained, the BBC reported. The opposition said 237 MPs from a range of parties took part in the march.

NPR reported that protests have spread across India in the past week, led by opposition parties and civil society groups. The Delhi protest came four days after the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), described by the BBC as a Gen Z-backed online satirical movement, organised demonstrations in Mumbai and Delhi also demanding the commissioner's resignation. The group described those demonstrations as the start of a nationwide campaign and called for further protests on 10 October, the BBC reported. NPR reported the campaign has been led in part by India's "Cockroach" youth movement, which it said previously organised street protests that forced the education minister to resign in July.

At the centre of the dispute is the Election Commission's Special Intensive Revision (SIR), a nationwide revision of voter lists that the BBC reported began in the eastern state of Bihar in June 2025 and later expanded to other parts of the country. The commission says the revision is intended to remove duplicate and ineligible voters; more than 130 million names have so far been removed from draft voter lists nationwide, according to the BBC. Opposition parties and activists allege many eligible voters have been wrongly excluded and accuse the commission of conducting the process improperly. The BJP and the Election Commission reject the allegations and say the revision has no political motive; Modi's party says the list is being updated to weed out what it calls "infiltrators", NPR reported.

Calls for Kumar's resignation intensified after the Indian Express newspaper reported that election commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally objected at least 14 times over a 10-month period to decisions and orders they said had been issued in the commission's name without their knowledge, the BBC reported. The objections related to additions and deletions from voter rolls, access to the voter database and the security of electoral data, with some concerns linked directly to the revision programme. The Election Commission, a three-member body comprising the chief election commissioner and two election commissioners, defended its decision-making, saying differing views were part of institutional functioning and decisions had ultimately been taken unanimously.

NPR reported that the issue was prominent in West Bengal's state elections in 2026 after a voter list revision removed about 9 million names, roughly 12% of the electorate, and that the deletions left millions of eligible voters unable to cast ballots. Modi's party won the state for the first time, according to NPR. NPR also reported that Indian law requires a majority vote of commission members to enact changes, making disagreements among them potentially significant.