India arrests 2,000, including ‘Cockroach’ leaders, in New Delhi crackdown

Police lock down New Delhi to foil protest demanding resignation of the country’s election chief.

India Cockroach Janta Party protest: Party leader and thousands of activists arrested

Police in India’s capital, New Delhi, have detained more than 2,000 protesters, opposition politicians, journalists, lawyers and the founders of the “Cockroach” youth movement in a bid to quash a rally demanding the resignation of the country’s election chief.

Thousands of police and paramilitary personnel were deployed across the ⁠city on Saturday, while mobile internet services were suspended in the central business district as authorities moved to stop a demonstration organised by the satirically-named Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) and other youth groups.

list 1 of 3 India’s Cockroach Party says members detained ahead of protest

list 2 of 3 Satire silenced: Indian artists face censorship as anti-Modi protests grow

list 3 of 3 India deploys police and restricts transport ahead of mass protest in Delhi

Dozens of metro stations and markets were also shut.

The Hindhu newspaper, citing New Delhi police sources, said nearly 2,500 protesters were detained across the capital. The Reuters news agency, meanwhile, citing a Ministry of Home Affairs official, put the figure at about 2,000.

Some 600 people were also arrested in the city of Mumbai, India’s financial hub, over the protests, according to the ANI news agency.

The protesters were demanding that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar resign over a revision of voter lists they say disproportionately benefits Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s governing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Protesters accuse the BJP of using the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists to sway results, and opposition parties say the revisions affected several recent state elections the party won, casting a shadow over polls in the world’s largest democracy.

Kumar has not commented, but the Election Commission and the BJP have denied allegations of wrongdoing.

The CJP had planned to gather thousands of people at Jantar Mantar, a designated protest site in central New Delhi. But on Saturday, the area was sealed off by security forces before the demonstration began.

Security forces also set ⁠up checkpoints on major roads and entry points across the city of 20 million people, boarded buses searching for protesters, and inspected vehicles.

Barricades and concrete blocks disrupted traffic, while anti-riot vehicles equipped with tear-gas launchers guarded key routes.

CJP leaders detained

Police detained the CJP’s founder, Abhijeet Dipke, as well as his associates, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, in an aeroplane upon arrival in New Delhi from Mumbai.

Dipke shared a video on his Instagram channel, showing a team of police officers entering the Air India plane after it landed. As they came closer, he said: “I have come to get arrested. I am not afraid of you guys.”

In another video shared by Ranka, Dipke was seen addressing the flight’s passengers.

“It was nice to know you all. We can see where the nation is heading,” he said. “This is dictatorship, where Delhi police has entered in the flight and trying to arrest us.”

Delhi police also detained other CJP members: YouTuber and Modi critic Dhruv Rathee ; Neha Bora, the national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), a leftist group affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist); Dipankar Bhattacharya, the general secretary of the party; and Prashant Bhushan, a senior lawyer at the Supreme Court.

Some opposition lawmakers, as well as former chief ministers – Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, Arvind Kejriwal of Delhi, and Pinarayi Vijayan of Kerala – were also detained, television channels showed.

Police personnel detain a supporter of the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) during a protest demanding the resignation of India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, in New Delhi on October 10, 2026 [AFP]

Despite the detentions of the founders of the youth movement, small protests took place elsewhere in the city, including at the popular crafts market “Dilli Haat”.

Shranaya, a state committee member of the left-wing Students’ Federation of India (SFI), who goes by her first name, told Al Jazeera that the SFI’s office in New Delhi had been under surveillance for hours, but members inside had managed to escape and protest.

“This is dictatorship, live and in front of us, just to protect a bureaucrat who steals elections for the BJP on Modi’s behest. They are murdering democracy in the daylight in the Indian capital,” she said.

“This government is unaware of the power of the people, and that is our upper hand. We do not have weapons, but we have zeal. We will be again on the streets, and we will keep returning,” she added. “We are students. We are unemployed. We are ‘cockroaches’ – and we will return.”

She then climbed a barricade but was dragged away by police and taken away in a bus.

Representatives of two digital news outlets said police briefly detained four of their reporters while they were covering the demonstrations. A Reuters journalist was also detained briefly before being released.

The protests represent one of the most serious tests yet for Modi and intensified after the Indian Express reported last week that two election commissioners had ⁠questioned Kumar’s revisions that removed roughly 130 million names from voter lists.

The BJP says its electoral success reflects Modi’s popularity and India’s economic growth, and accuses opposition parties of spreading misinformation.

BJP spokesman Sambit Patra dismissed the demonstrators as “anarchic elements” and said that “their flop show has been completely demolished”.

“What is happening at Jantar Mantar, what you can see on TV and a few social media handles, is not India’s story. India is calm and going ahead under good governance,” he told reporters.

The opposition Congress party’s president, Mallikarjun Kharge, slammed Modi’s government after the detentions.

“Modi government has turned the ‘Mother of Democracy’ into a ‘Muzzled Democracy’!” he posted on X. “Detentions, arrests, jails, lathis [batons] and pellets cannot deter the people of India. Since the days of our freedom struggle, the youth have been at the forefront of shaping the nation’s destiny.”

The United Nations Human Rights Office expressed concerns over mass detentions before and during the protests.

“We call on the authorities to ensure that the right to peaceful assembly is fully respected and fulfilled,” UN Human Rights spokesperson Thameen Al-Kheetan said in a statement.

He also urged authorities to engage in “meaningful dialogue” to address the “broadly ‌held” concerns expressed.

Amnesty International warned that the detentions signal the Indian government’s desperate attempts to “suppress critical voices”, while the Committee to Protect Journalists urged Indian police to “respect journalists”.

The Indian mission to the UN in Geneva, however, called the global concerns “misplaced” and said they constitute “an unwarranted interference in the internal affairs of India”.

It stressed that the right to peaceful assembly was guaranteed by India’s Constitution. “As in every democracy, Indian citizens exercise this right subject to reasonable restrictions in the interest of public order,” the statement added.

The unrest comes before a series of important state elections beginning in early 2027.

Sanjay Kapoor, editor of Hard News Magazine and a political analyst, told Al Jazeera that it is “very strange” to see Modi’s government “so panic-driven and fearful of what the protesters might do”.

“The truth is that the BJP and the centre have been very, very scared of how it will all play out,” he said.

Kapoor noted that most people coming to the protests do not want Modi’s BJP to continue to govern.

“Modi’s government has begun to lose a lot of credibility at the moment,” he said. “BJP is afraid that the ground has shifted dramatically against them and they would find it very difficult to come back to power.”

Security personnel detain a protester in New Delhi, India, on October 10, 2026 [Adnan Abidi/Reuters]

警方封锁新德里，阻止要求该国选举委员会主席辞职的抗议活动。

印度蟑螂人民党抗议活动：党魁及数千名活动人士被捕

印度首都新德里的警方拘留了 2000 多名抗议者、反对派政治家、记者、律师和“蟑螂”青年运动的创始人，试图镇压一场要求该国选举委员会主席辞职的集会。

周六，数千名警察和准军事人员被部署到全市各地，同时中央商务区的移动互联网服务也被暂停，当局采取行动制止由讽刺地称为“蟑螂人民党”（CJP）和其他青年团体组织的示威活动。

列表1/3：印度蟑螂党称其成员在抗议活动前被拘留

列表 2/3：讽刺作品遭噤声：随着反莫迪抗议活动日益增多，印度艺术家面临审查

印度在德里大规模抗议活动前部署警力并限制交通（共3条，此为第3条）

数十个地铁站和市场也关闭了。

《印度教徒报》援引新德里警方消息人士的话称，首都各地近2500名抗议者被拘留。与此同时，路透社援引内政部官员的话称，被拘留人数约为2000人。

据印度亚洲新闻社（ANI）报道，在印度金融中心孟买，约有600人因参与抗议活动而被捕。

抗议者要求首席选举专员贾内什·库马尔辞职，因为他们认为选民名单的修订对总理纳伦德拉·莫迪领导的印度人民党（BJP）产生了不成比例的益处。

抗议者指责印度人民党利用选民名单的特别强化修订（SIR）来左右选举结果，反对党表示，这些修订影响了该党最近赢得的几个邦选举，给这个世界最大民主国家的选举蒙上了阴影。

库马尔尚未对此事发表评论，但选举委员会和人民党均否认了有关不当行为的指控。

人民正义党原计划在位于新德里市中心的指定抗议地点简塔曼塔天文台集结数千人。但周六，在示威活动开始前，该区域已被安全部队封锁。

安全部队还在这座拥有 2000 万人口的城市的主要道路和入口处设立检查站，登上公共汽车搜寻抗议者，并检查车辆。

路障和混凝土路障阻碍了交通，而配备催泪瓦斯发射器的防暴车辆则守卫着主要道路。

CJP领导人被拘留

警方在从孟买抵达新德里的飞机上拘留了CJP创始人阿比吉特·迪普克及其同伙索拉夫·达斯和阿舒托什·兰卡。

迪普克在他的Instagram账号上分享了一段视频，视频显示一队警察在印度航空飞机降落后进入机舱。当他们走近时，他说：“我是来被逮捕的。我不怕你们。”

在兰卡分享的另一段视频中，可以看到迪普克正在向航班上的乘客讲话。

“很高兴认识大家。我们能看出这个国家正在走向何方，”他说。“这是独裁统治，德里警方竟然闯入飞机，试图逮捕我们。”

德里警方还拘留了其他CJP成员：YouTube博主兼莫迪批评者Dhruv Rathee；全印学生协会（AISA）全国主席Neha Bora，该协会是隶属于印度共产党（马列）的左翼团体；该党总书记Dipankar Bhattacharya；以及最高法院高级律师Prashant Bhushan。

电视画面显示，一些反对派议员以及前首席部长——西孟加拉邦的玛玛塔·班纳吉、德里的阿尔温德·凯杰里瓦尔和喀拉拉邦的皮纳拉伊·维贾扬——也被拘留。

2026年10月10日，在新德里，警方人员拘留了一名蟑螂人民党（CJP）的支持者，当时他们正在抗议要求印度首席选举专员贾内什·库马尔辞职。[法新社]

尽管青年运动的创始人被拘留，但该市其他地方仍发生了小规模抗议活动，包括在颇受欢迎的工艺品市场“德里哈特”。

印度左翼学生联合会（SFI）州委员会成员Shranaya（她只用自己的名字）告诉半岛电视台，SFI在新德里的办公室已被监视数小时，但里面的成员设法逃脱并进行了抗议。

“这就是独裁，就在我们眼前，就为了保护一个奉莫迪之命为人民党窃取选举的官僚。他们正在光天化日之下，在印度首都扼杀民主，”她说。

“这届政府根本不了解人民的力量，而这正是我们的优势所在。我们没有武器，但我们有热情。我们会再次走上街头，而且我们会一直走下去，”她补充道。“我们是学生，我们是失业者，我们是‘蟑螂’——但我们会回来的。”

随后她翻越了路障，但被警察拖走并被公共汽车带走。

两家数字新闻媒体的代表称，警方在他们报道示威活动时短暂拘留了四名记者。路透社一名记者也曾被短暂拘留，后获释。

这些抗议活动对莫迪而言是迄今为止最严峻的考验之一，此前《印度快报》上周报道称，两名选举专员对库马尔的修改提出质疑，该修改从选民名单中删除了大约 1.3 亿个名字，此后抗议活动愈演愈烈。

印度人民党表示，其选举成功反映了莫迪的受欢迎程度和印度的经济增长，并指责反对党散布虚假信息。

印度人民党发言人桑比特·帕特拉将示威者斥为“无政府主义分子”，并表示“他们的拙劣表演已被彻底摧毁”。

“在简塔·曼塔天文台发生的事情，你们在电视和一些社交媒体平台上看到的事情，并不能代表印度的真实情况。印度目前局势平静，并在良好的治理下稳步前进。”他告诉记者。

反对党国大党主席马利卡尔俊·卡尔格在拘留事件发生后猛烈抨击了莫迪政府。

“莫迪政府把‘民主之母’变成了‘噤声的民主’！”他在X上发帖说。“拘留、逮捕、监禁、警棍和弹丸都无法阻止印度人民。自我们争取自由的斗争以来，青年一直站在塑造国家命运的最前沿。”

联合国人权事务高级专员办事处对抗议活动前后发生的大规模拘留事件表示关切。

联合国人权事务发言人塔米恩·阿尔-希坦在一份声明中表示：“我们呼吁当局确保和平集会的权利得到充分尊重和实现。”

他还敦促有关当局进行“有意义的对话”，以解决民众普遍表达的关切。

国际特赦组织警告说，这些拘留行动表明印度政府正不顾一切地试图“压制批评的声音”，而保护记者委员会则敦促印度警方“尊重记者”。

然而，印度常驻日内瓦联合国代表团称这些全球关切是“毫无根据的”，并表示这些关切构成“对印度内政的无端干涉”。

声明强调，印度宪法保障和平集会的权利。“与所有民主国家一样，印度公民行使这项权利时，会受到维护公共秩序的合理限制。”声明补充道。

此次动乱发生在2027年初开始的一系列重要州选举之前。

《硬新闻杂志》编辑兼政治分析家桑杰·卡普尔告诉半岛电视台，看到莫迪政府“如此恐慌，害怕抗议者可能会做什么”，这“非常奇怪”。

他说：“事实是，人民党和中央政府一直非常非常害怕事情最终会如何发展。”

卡普尔指出，大多数参加抗议活动的人都不希望莫迪领导的印度人民党继续执政。

他说：“莫迪政府目前已经开始失去很多信誉。人民党担心形势已经发生了巨大变化，对他们非常不利，他们很难重新掌权。”

2026年10月10日，印度新德里，安全人员拘留一名抗议者。[Adnan Abidi/路透社]