India’s ‘Cockroach’ leaders released from detention after police crackdown |

A New Delhi court has ordered the release of three leaders of the India’s “Cockroach” youth movement, including its founder Abhijeet Dipke, according to their lawyers, a day after they were detained in a rally demanding the resignation of the country’s election chief.

The trio were arrested when their plane landed in New Delhi on Saturday as the movement planned to gather thousands of people at Jantar Mantar in Central New Delhi.

More than 2,000 people, including opposition politicians, journalists, and lawyers, were detained by the police.

Ratna Singh, the head lawyer of the satirically-named Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), said in a social media post on Sunday that Dipke and the others had been released by an executive magistrate’s court. She said they had been released on the condition that they made “no breach of peace for one year”.

Thousands of police and paramilitary personnel were deployed across the ⁠city on Saturday, as mobile internet services were suspended in the central business district. Dozens of metro stations and markets were also shut.

The Hindu newspaper, citing 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 had detained CJP founder Dipke, as well as his associates, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, in an airplane 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.

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…