Published Oct 09, 2026 | 4:58 PM ⚊ Updated Oct 09, 2026 | 5:02 PM
Rahul Gandhi has vowed that he and the INDIA bloc will not relent until Gyanesh Kumar quits. (Photo | Nacchinarkkiniyan M)
Synopsis: Rahul Gandhi scaling barricades with the national flag in hand. Abhijeet Dipke and the cockroaches coming out once again in big numbers. Women like Neha Bora roaring like tigresses. Elders arriving with walking sticks and in wheelchairs to stand beside our young. As Gen Z takes to the streets against SIR, fear is retreating and a gloriously defiant generation is standing up to be counted.
“Pack your bags, this is a long struggle…”
– Gen Z’s call.
The country is now in turmoil. Our country’s democracy is in danger. The Indian Constitution is being violated at will, without any hesitation. The continuous suppression of people’s freedoms and rights is underway.
Across the country, religious fanaticism and hatred are being stoked to divide the people. Many students have no proper schools and no opportunities to study. The young are finding it increasingly difficult to find jobs, as the State of Working India study by Azim Premji University recently underlined. The condition of farmers, workers, women, Dalits and Adivasis is terrible. Overall, very few in this country are at peace.
Once upon a time, this would have been dismissed as an exaggerated assessment by a few intellectuals. No more. In reality, even though everyone felt, “Why has the country turned out like this?”, a pervasive fear prevented them from voicing the question till recently.
This began to change once Gen Z made its presence felt with its protests, generating ripples of ever-surging hope in our society.
The silent acceptance was shattered with a bang. Fear has been kicked aside, and people have begun standing up to be counted. Girls who were told by a patriarchal society to stay quiet and live with their mouths shut have poured out onto the streets and are roaring like tigresses.
Even the elders have been roused and are coming to dharnas and meetings with their walking sticks and in their wheelchairs, standing beside these brave children.
More and more people have begun to recognise that protecting democratic institutions and the country, beyond parties and ideologies, is the immediate need of the hour.
The planned protest at the Jantar Mantar on October 10, which the government is going all out to block with as many as 26,000 cops on the ground in Fortress Delhi, is being called ‘Jantar Mantar 2.0’. The new struggle revolves around protecting the electoral system, the Constitution and democracy.
For the past several days, many student organisations, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), opposition parties and civil society organisations have been conducting agitations across the country. Large-scale dharnas and processions are taking place at places such as the Jantar Mantar, Shivaji Park in Mumbai and Freedom Park in Bengaluru.
Ahead of the dharna at Jantar Mantar, student and youth organisations jointly held a press conference and issued a united statement. They demanded that the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Gyanesh Kumar, resign immediately; that a criminal case be registered against him and he be investigated; that the SIR be stopped; that the January 2025 voter list be restored; that an independent inquiry be conducted into all irregularities; and that the 2023 CEC appointment law be repealed.
“If student organisations, the INDIA bloc and civil society all stand on the same side and fight unitedly, we will achieve victory,” said student leader Neha Bora.
The Special Intensive Revision (SIR) that has brought the protestors out into the streets was rolled out in Bihar in June 2025 and later expanded nationwide.
From the beginning, intellectuals, opposition parties and various people’s organisations have expressed serious concerns, saying that the real purpose of this revision of rolls is questionable. All of them warned that the BJP’s hidden agenda was driving a non-transparent process, and wanted it to be stopped. They had criticised it as a path to “vote theft”.
Their worst fears have played out.
The poor, minorities, women and migrant workers have been targeted in large numbers under the pretext of them not having proper documents. Unauthorised changes were also made to Form 6, making the entry of new voters into the rolls even more difficult. In some states, particularly West Bengal and Delhi, voter reductions of 10–35 per cent occurred in the initial stages.
In the first phase in Bihar, there was a reduction of about 47 lakh (9 per cent). In the second phase, 7.2 crore deletions took place across 12 states and Union Territories. Reductions in the lakhs continue even in the third phase.
Overall, more than 13 crore voter deletions, the entire population of many countries, have occurred across 30 states and Union Territories. We will have to wait and see how many more lakhs and crores will be deleted by the time this entire process ends.
The investigation by Ritika Chopra of The Indian Express, based on the Election Commission’s internal notes, letters and interviews with officials, has now called the validity of the whole process into question.
As everyone who has followed the investigation now knows, the two Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, officially recorded their objections at least 14 times over the past 10 months. The two Commissioners wrote dissent notes, terming many of the changes illegal, unauthorised and arbitrary. Yet, the decisions were carried out without even informing them.
Overall, the evidence uncovered by this investigation has led to demands from the Opposition for Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation and an inquiry into the irregularities. It has raised serious doubts and many questions about the transparency of the electoral process, the independence of the Commission and its functioning.
Gyanesh Kumar is a 1988-batch Kerala cadre IAS officer. He was appointed Election Commissioner in 2024 and CEC in February 2025.
He is an officer who has been accused of corruption and even of driving a Malaysian project manager, Lee See Been, to suicide 20 years ago. Seen as a trusted loyalist of the BJP, the Opposition has called Gyanesh a “puppet of the Modi government” and the “chief architect of vote theft”.
Now, the agitation to oust him has begun in earnest in the country. Many people who set out on September 25 to reach Jantar Mantar and protest were detained.
On September 28, Neha Bora, along with Yogendra Yadav, Prashant Bhushan, Manoj Jha, Nikhil Dey, Nandita Narain and others, tried to go there again. They were arrested.
Atishi, Saurabh Bhardwaj, Aishe Ghosh and, following them, Sanjeev Jha, AAP’s Sanjay Singh, Yogendra Yadav, Brinda Karat and other prominent people are also taking part in the protests.
Organisations such as AISA (All India Students Association), SFI, AISF, DYFI, KYS, Disha and PDS have been continuously holding dharnas since October 2.
On October 2, Gandhi Jayanti, thousands of people were detained in many states. Protests continued on October 3 and 4 as well. Neha Bora was detained for three consecutive days. On October 4, when male police officers tried to take her away in an unmarked car, many girls courageously came in the way.
At Mumbai’s famed Shivaji Park, nearly 10,000 people, under the leadership of Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke, attended a dharna on October 2 even though the police did not grant permission. Shabana Azmi, Vishal Dadlani, Naseeruddin Shah and many other celebrities took part.
On October 8, at Freedom Park in Bengaluru, the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) organised a “People’s Tribunal” and “Chappal Protest” in which people from Karnataka who had been deleted from the voter list due to SIR presented evidence. Dipke, the well-known actor and activist Prakash Raj, YouTuber Dhruv Rathee and many student leaders participated.
The Congress and the INDIA bloc, too, are demanding Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation and the end of SIR. Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi, whose defiance has seen him even scale barricades with the national flag in hand, has been categorical in terming it a “vote theft” and called the Chief Election Commissioner, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah the “three traitors”.
Under the leadership of Rahul Gandhi, Mallikarjun Kharge and Priyanka Gandhi, the INDIA bloc marched from Parliament to the Election Commission on October 6 and 7, held a dharna for more than eight hours at Akashvani Bhavan, and then tried to reach Jantar Mantar. Rahul, Priyanka and many MPs were dragged and detained by the cops on both days.
Because of a series of mistakes over the past twelve years, the BJP government is now in a position where it cannot give answers and has to defend itself.
At the same time, it is also trying by any means to cling to power without admitting its mistakes. After realising that lies, communal conflicts, threats, creating divisions and the threat of Income Tax and Enforcement Directorate raids no longer work, it has been left with just the tool of repression.
Denial of permission for meetings, cases against opposition parties, students and hundreds of others, the use of overwhelming force, and the violence employed against Opposition MPs, women protesters and journalists are all emblematic.
The government repeatedly warns that it will not hesitate to use draconian laws such as the UAPA against those in this movement.
People in plain clothes or wearing brand-new police uniforms without identification marks are attacking protesters and behaving indecently with girls. Social media is fearing the worst, with reports and images claiming that large numbers of people belonging to organisations such as the RSS and Bajrang Dal have set out for Jantar Mantar from all corners of the country carrying sticks and knives, and that a civil war is inevitable.
The anger, determination and courage of the students in the face of all this is remarkable. Even after being repeatedly beaten and arrested, Gen Z is not backing down. The fact that these children continue to stand firm for justice and democracy without any fear, despite all that is happening, is moving many.
“They think of us as dogs and cockroaches… but we are citizens of this country; we have the right to question. The days when we were afraid of you are over,” said Neha Bora.
After people had been pushed to exhaustion and frustration in every possible way, fear has begun to retreat, and a glorious defiance is taking its place. This was inevitable.
Also Read:
Indira Gandhi, Narendra Modi and the march of folly: The same mistake, fifty years apart
‘SIR is a bloodless political genocide to exterminate citizenship’: Dr Parakala Prabhakar
Why CEC Gyanesh Kumar should resign, and why the appointment process needs to change too
(Views are personal. Edited by R Rajesh Kumar.)
