NEW DELHI: India’s opposition alliance is taking its weeks-long fight over contested voter rolls to the streets, staging a mass rally intended to mount one of the stiffest challenges to Prime Minister Narendra Modi in his more than a decade in office.
The INDIA bloc is organising the "Save the Vote, Save the Country” protest on Sunday (Nov 1) at New Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan, a sprawling ground in the heart of the capital that has hosted some of the nation’s biggest political demonstrations. Rahul Gandhi, who is spearheading the protests and seeking the ouster of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, has urged students, farmers, workers, women and youth to join the gathering. Gandhi’s Indian National Congress is targeting a turnout of one million.
"There is huge anger, huge emotional pain, because millions of people are being disenfranchised. Their vote is being stolen from them,” Gandhi, leader of the opposition in the lower house, said ahead of the planned demonstration. "We are defending the vote, which is the expression of all Indians.”
The event will bring together two strands of the agitation that had largely operated separately. The youth-led, satirical movement Cockroach Janta Party, which organised some of the largest demonstrations against Kumar last month, has formally backed the rally. The group said the poll body’s chief has lost the trust required to oversee free and fair elections and repeated its demand for his resignation.
The Cockroach party’s earlier campaign over exam irregularities drew tens of thousands onto the streets and ended with the rare resignation of a senior minister, demonstrating the potential for public pressure to extract concessions from the government.
The latest dispute centers on a sweeping voter-roll revision that opposition parties allege is disenfranchising legitimate voters after millions of names were excluded from draft lists. The Election Commission denies any wrongdoing, saying the exercise is intended to remove duplicate, deceased and ineligible voters.
Members of the INDIA bloc staged a symbolic public impeachment of the election chief Saturday and stepped up demands for his removal.
"The voter is the focal point of the entire electoral process,” Meira Kumar, a former speaker of the lower house, said during the proceedings. "If even a single voter is denied the right to cast their vote, it strikes a blow to the very soul of our democracy.”
Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party has pushed back against the opposition’s accusations, defending the voter-roll review and accusing Gandhi and his allies of undermining constitutional institutions. The BJP has also taken its campaign to the streets and criticised the opposition for holding Sunday’s protest on the 42nd anniversary of the deadly 1984 anti-Sikh riots.
For Sunday’s gathering, the police have granted permission provided nobody marches anywhere, and it wraps up by 5 p.m.
Even as it allowed the stationary protest to proceed, Modi’s administration has more broadly tightened controls on demonstrators. On Oct. 10, his administration undertook mass detentions to prevent the Cockroach group from gathering at Jantar Mantar, a location closer to parliament, sharpening a debate over the space for dissent in the world’s largest democracy.
Ramlila Maidan has long served as a staging ground for movements that reshaped Indian politics. In 2011, an anti-corruption campaign drew tens of thousands to the venue, cementing public discontent that culminated in the defeat of the Congress-led government in 2014. Decades earlier, a 1975 rally led by Jayaprakash Narayan catalysed the resistance to Indira Gandhi’s Emergency rule.
While Modi has remained India’s most popular national politician through much of his time in power, several major street agitations have challenged his administration. They include deadly protests against the Citizenship Amendment Act - which fast-tracked citizenship for non-Muslim immigrants - and the year-long farmers’ strike.
There are "extensive police personnel and camera coverage arrangements” for the Sunday rally, according to Deputy Commissioner of Police Rohit Rajbir.
"The sensitivity is enhanced in a way that we have to keep a check on some nefarious elements who may try and come and disrupt the whole rally,” he said. "We’re very sure that we can carry out a peaceful event.” - Bloomberg
