60,000 security personnel were deployed across India’s national capital on October 10.​ This included the police of Delhi and neighboring states, as well as paramilitary forces pulled from regions of India affected by armed insurgencies.

They sealed off central Delhi to stop protesters opposing the mass disenfranchisement of 130 million voters from reaching Jantar Mantar, the designated protest site on Parliament Street.​

The railways cancelled over 250 trains to Delhi. “So far as I remember, it has never happened in the history of Indian Railways that so many trains were cancelled just because of a protest or agitation,” said Shiv Gopal Mishra, general secretary of the All India Railwaymen’s Federation (AIRF).​

Scores of activists already travelling to the national capital from other states of India were detained on moving trains and forced to alight at numerous railway stations in multiple states. Many grassroots activists in several other states were placed under preventive detention in their homes ahead of the protest. Paramilitary forces were deployed at checkpoints on Delhi’s borders, where vehicles were searched for any signs of protesters, placards, etc.​

Within the national capital, 45 metro train stations were closed. Internet and telecommunications were down in the four-kilometer radius of Jantar Mantar. Around Parliament Street alone, where Jantar Mantar is located, over 3,000 security personnel were deployed, with multi-layer barricades, each manned by about a hundred.​

Even outside this garrisoned zone, police held up commuters entering central Delhi at numerous checkpoints, causing traffic jams while enquiring about their purpose of travel before letting them through, to ensure they were headed to work, not to protest.

Communists fight back

Evading this anticipated hurdle, hundreds of activists from the Students Federation of India (SFI) and the Democratic Youth Federation of India (DYFI) had already positioned themselves the previous night just over three kilometers northeast of Jantar Mantar at HKS Surjeet Bhavan.​

A memorial to the freedom fighter and veteran communist leader, HKS Surjeet, it serves as an education center of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) [CPIM] and also hosts SFI’s Central Committee office.​

The Delhi Police's midnight attempt to intimidate students at the SFI Central Committee office in HKS Surjeet Bhawan was promptly rebuffed by the CPI(M) party leaders there. pic.twitter.com/x45gOglsCk

— CPI (M) (@cpimspeak) October 10, 2026

“But the police knew we were there,” recalled SFI activist Asikul. The police had tried over the last two nights to enter the premises to take stock of the preparations, but were stopped. Activists worried the police could barricade the gates and stop this mobilization of hundreds from stepping out to protest the following morning.​

Quietly, after midnight, student activists slipped out of HKS Surjeet Bhavan in groups of five, one after another, with cover stories for travel reasons if intercepted on the way. By six in the morning, about 250 of them had relocated to the CPIM’s national headquarters, AKG Bhavan, to the west of Jantar Mantar.

Back at HKS Surjeet Bhavan, where hundreds more stayed behind, barricading began between 10 and 10:30 am, just 100 meters from its gate, recalled Aman Saini, the Delhi State Secretary of the DYFI.

About 300-350 activists stormed out of the gates and made it through before the barricades could cut them off. Waving red flags and holding placards calling for the dismissal and arrest of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Gyanesh Kumar, they marched barely a kilometer before facing a police cordon. The police lined up shoulder to shoulder, batons held horizontal to block the protesters’ way forward.​

Continuing to march, the protesters headed straight into the cordon. A tussle ensued amid chorus chants of ‘vote chor, gaddi chhod’, demanding the “vote thief” CEC’s resignation. As the protesters in the front line grappled with the police – each engaging multiple officers by dropping to the ground and resisting detention – others broke through the cordon and sprinted ahead.

Barely 300 meters ahead, a line of barricades blocked the road. Protesters stormed ahead and engaged the police. Slipping through the tussle, “I pulled the barricade from below and shoved its top. Thaad! – it fell over,” explained Aman.​

Wrangling themselves free from the security personnel, many more dashed ahead, several slashing their feet against the metal of the fallen barricade, only to turn left on Minto Road and drop another barricade.

They had covered nearly half the distance to Jantar Mantar, reaching within 150 meters of the Connaught outer circle, one curve away from Parliament Street hosting the protest site.

“But the barricade there was re-enforced. We had almost managed to pull one down when the police charged at us with batons,” added Aman. Having lost numbers at each of the previous barricades, “we were only about 50 left. So they managed to detain us and shove us into buses. At least six of us were injured.”​

Those who had evaded detention at the previous barricades, but were unable to push ahead, regrouped outside HKS Surjeet Bhavan and started sloganeering. Police, accompanied by paramilitary, charged with batons and detained them, and even allegedly tried to break into the premises, but were held back at its gate.

Paramilitary at the party gates

The contingent of activists who had relocated to AKG Bhavan under the cover of darkness did not have it any easier. They had only managed to stretch the security personnel and their barricades across two fronts. A paramilitary force began assembling outside its gates around 10 am, roughly the same time as the barricading began at HKS.​

Several members of CPIM’s Central Committee (CC) and Politburo, including current and former Members of Parliament, many of them grey-haired, were staying at the AKG Bhavan for a CC meeting. They joined the students as they marched out.​

“Some 20 people were detained right outside the gate – almost the whole frontline. The rest of us behind them pushed through. We kept running,” recalled Asikul.

About 15-20 minutes into the march, SFI activist Noel was detained. “I was not taken to a detention bus, where others were held. I was held alone in a bus used to transport the police. There I was beaten for two hours,” he said, sharing pictures of the injuries he sustained on his face.

“Two of my comrades realized that I was being held alone. So they intentionally got themselves detained near my bus and joined me. They also got beaten up,” he added. Later, when the police started marching them to the detention bus, allegedly prodding them forward by jabbing the blunt ends of their batons into their backs, “we managed to escape.”

Meanwhile, others had pushed ahead. Among them were SFI National Joint Secretary Aishe Ghosh and the DYFI’s national president, AA Rahim. They marched about a kilometer from AKG Bhavan before being apprehended at the roundabout near Gurudwara Bangla Sahib. The SFI alleged that “Aishe Ghosh was assaulted by male police personnel in the absence of women officers.” ​

A showdown ensued. Dropping to the road and bracing in a huddle, Aishe and other female activists held ground as female police personnel who arrived later grappled with them, eventually dragging them away to detention buses, about 1.5 km away from Jantar Mantar.

Other activists, including Asikul, had strode ahead, breaking through three barricades, and reaching within 400 meters of Jantar Mantar. “We were not able to break through the fourth. We were only about 35 left,” said Asikul.

“Using chokeholds and baton charges, they detained us. Some managed to escape detention by breaking out through a bus window,” an increasingly popular mode of resistance by the younger generation of activists, determined to make detentions as costly and as strenuous as possible.​

Detention at the stadiums

Asikul and the rest of the detainees were driven almost 50 km to Bawana in northwest Delhi and held at the Rajiv Gandhi stadium, where hundreds more were already being held. Among them was 77-year-old Manik Sarkar, a senior communist leader and Tripura state Chief Minister from 1998 to 2018. He was accompanied by the northeastern state’s current opposition leader, Jitendra Chaudhury. Veteran trade unionist and former Member of Parliament (MP) Tapan Sen, along with other ex-legislators, were also held there.

“There was not a drop of water in any tap in the toilet. We were not even provided with clean water to drink. When we demanded, we were asked to drink from” an old, ill-maintained leaky tank in the premises, said SFI activist Utkarsh, who was also held here. “We challenged the police to drink that water. They refused.” ​

When detainees began falling sick, Utkarsh and other activists warned the senior police officer in charge of this detention of consequences for mistreating a former Chief Minister and ex-MPs. They reminded him of his responsibility if one of these elderly political leaders fell seriously ill. Only then did the police “finally provide us with water and some snacks.”

Seven other stadiums in the city, along with several other public facilities, were reportedly turned into detention centers that day, when security personnel detained over 7,000 people from the streets of the national capital, including protesters, journalists and even pedestrians suspected of being protesters.

More than 7 km south of Jantar Mantar, near the INA market, outside barricaded central Delhi, police detained protesting activists of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), led by Neha Bora, one of the most recognizable faces of the protest movement.

Detentions were also reported in Raj Ghat, about 4.5 km northeast of Jantar Mantar, where the Revolutionary Workers’ Party of India (RWPI) and its affiliated mass organizations had organized a protest.

At the airport, almost 15 km to the southwest of Jantar Mantar, the police boarded a plane as soon as it landed from Mumbai – even before the passengers could disembark – to detain Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das, and Ashutosh Ranka from their seats. They are the top leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). 

“Cockroaches”

The pressure group started as a satirical protest on social media in May, after the Chief Justice of India said: “There are youngsters like cockroaches, who don’t get any employment or have any place in profession. Some of them become media, some of them become social media, RTI activists and other activists.”  ​

The CJP has since become a material force, playing a key role in the protest against exam paper leaks that forced the Union Education Minister to resign in July. ​

About two months after his resignation, an investigation by the Indian Express newspaper exposed irregularities in the conduct of the Chief Election Commissioner (CEC), Gyanesh Kumar. Several times, his two fellow election commissioners had flagged their concerns about his potentially illegal and unconstitutional decisions.

These pertained to the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, still underway after already deleting the names of 130 million people from India’s voter rolls – in an unprecedented shrinking of India’s electorate. Opposition parties have long alleged that this exercise is meant to help the ruling far-right Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, consolidate its hold on power.  

Earlier this month, on the birth anniversary of Gandhi on October 2, protests began, calling for the scrapping of the SIR and the CEC’s resignation. On October 7, the CJP called on youngsters to take Jantar Mantar again on October 10.

In response to its call, thousands of youngsters, most in their late teens and early 20s, kept arriving in small groups to central Delhi throughout the day, only to be whisked away by the police.​

Detention as deterrence

“These youngsters, who were not part of any cadre-based organization, were particularly harassed by police because they identified them as vulnerable. They were threatened, their phones and keys were snatched,” said DYFI’s Delhi State Vice President, Rikta Krishnaswamy, who was held with hundreds of them at a makeshift detention center in Jafar Kalan, over 45 km west of Jantar Mantar.​

Bundled into a bus at the final barricade reached by the march from HKS Bhavan that morning, Rikta was brought here by midday, when “the electrician was still installing the fan. We were held until evening with nothing to eat – not even a cup of tea. The police are trying to make detention as much of a deterrent as possible.”

But the protesters were not deterred. The very next day, DYFI activists, including several central committee members, gathered at Connaught Place, a 15-minute walk from Jantar Mantar, which remained cordoned off, even as the overall restrictions on movement in central Delhi had eased.​

Custodial torture, sexual harassment

Soon after they began staging a protest, security personnel swarmed in. The detained protesters “were not taken to any police station,” according to a petition alleging custodial torture, filed in the Supreme Court by AA Rahim, the youth organization’s national president and an MP.

“Instead, while still near Connaught Place, the bus was driven to a closed and heavily guarded space in front of the Daryaganj restaurant, away from public view, out of the reach of the media and without any CCTV cameras. There, the detainees were sorted according to gender and then forcibly shifted into a specialized police van divided into five separate cells.”​

These vehicles “functioned as unrecorded, mobile places of detention, wholly outside the safeguards of the Constitution,” added the petition. “Inside the cells of the van, the detainees were beaten on the face, kicked on the backbone with boots and struck on the head. Several of the personnel wore no name badges.”

At a press conference on October 12, women activists of the SFI showed bruises and alleged sexual harassment by security personnel.

But even the alleged custodial torture and sexual harassment has not deterred the protests, which are widening, drawing in more sections of society into the agitation.

Farmers and workers to join the agitation​

Representatives of India’s largest and oldest farmers’ union, the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), the All India Agricultural Workers’ Union (AIAWU), the Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU), the All India Democratic Women’s Association (AIDWA), along with SFI and DYFI leaders, met at the HKS Surjeet Bhavan on October 14.​

Several public intellectuals and artists also participated in this meeting of mass and class organizations’ leaders, where they jointly formed the All India Platform of People Against SIR. This platform announced October 23 as a Nationwide Street Action Day Against SIR. 

Condemning the central government’s denotification of Jantar Mantar as a designated protest site on October 12, the platform gave a slogan to turn every street and every village into Jantar Mantar.

“Unparalleled and unprecedented” police repression in India, where thousands of protesters demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar were met with mass detentions, internet shutdowns, and a brutal crackdown across Delhi over the weekend. Dr. Nitheesh Narayanan of the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research joins Zoe Alexandra and Rania Khalek, following the deployment of 50,000 police and armed forces to suppress youth-led protests over the Special Intensive Revision’s removal of more than 130 million names from voter rolls.

Narayanan says Saturday’s action marked a turning point in India’s months-long wave of repression, uniting students, the left, and the Gen Z-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) in the fight for a democratic, secular India – “and the idea that it’s the people, not power, who define a country.” He breaks down how Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) stacked the committee that appointed Commissioner Kumar, why the SIR disproportionately targets minorities and the poor, and why the outrage and demands for accountability are growing despite the crackdown. And as Trump pushes a unified voter roll in the US, India’s purge could offer a preview of what’s at stake: “Is this democracy, or is it the daylight murder of democracy?”

Watch full episodes of BT Live, join breakthroughnews.org as a member today!

India’s Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) reacted strongly to the US announcement to suspend the Permanent Labor Certification (PERM) program used by major IT companies for getting green cards for their foreign employees.

Reacting to the announcement made by the US Labor Secretary in the presence of Vice President J D Vance, India’s MEA, on Friday, October 9, called it a move harmful for the “shared ambitions of both countries.”

US Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling said on Thursday that his department will not accept any fresh application for PERM or process the pending applications from eight major IT companies.

The companies named were Microsoft, HCL, Cognizant, Adobe, Capgemini, Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Infosysis, and Wipro.

Among these firms are some of India’s biggest IT companies with the majority of them employing a large number of IT professionals from outside the US. The move is seen as a part of the Donald Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration.  

Almost 70% of H-1B visa holders are Indians which means the halt in PERM will affect the Indian IT professionals the most.

PERM is the first step for an employer in the US to sponsor a green card for its foreign employee. According to the US laws, the employer must prove it tried and failed to get a local for the job before it can sponsor a foreign person.

According to Sonderling, these eight companies have sought almost three million foreign workers and received over 230,000 H-1B visas and over 100,000 PERMs since 2009, claiming all these were “jobs that were taken from American workers.”

Vance said the Donald Trump administration wants the companies to prioritize local recruitment instead of getting “foreign indentured labor.”

He accused companies of abusing the H-1B visa program, claiming there have been multiple cases pending in the federal investigation about fraud in recruitment and the violation of its “best of the best” clause.

Unwarranted and deeply offensive 

In a brief statement, India’s MEA on Friday called Vance’s comments about “foreign indentured labor” “unwarranted” and deeply offensive, claiming it “ignores the fact that Indian professionals in the US are highly educated and skilled contributors to its economy and innovative ecosystem.”

“The history of the US itself has been shaped by generations of immigrants whose labor, enterprise and innovation have contributed to its growth and prosperity” it underlined, further noting that “resorting to terminology that carries painful historical and colonial legacy connotations is deeply offensive.” 

Millions of Indians were taken out of the country to different parts of the world for indentured labor during the British colonial period in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  

The US decision has already led to widespread reactions from the opposition groups asking the Indian government to take measures to protect the interest of the country’s IT professionals. 

In a post on X, Jairam Ramesh, leader of the main opposition party, the Indian National Congress (INC), asked the government to retaliate to the US move, claiming failure to do so would be tantamount to surrendering the country’s interests to a bully.

Ramesh accused the Narendra Modi-led ultra-right-wing government in the country of adopting a policy of “appeasement” toward the US, citing its recent decision to impose user charges on payments through mobile phones in the country as one crucial example of how it is going out of the way to do so.

Ramesh claimed Washington’s decision to suspend the visas yet again proves that such a policy never pays off.

Scores of the elected opposition members of India’s Parliament were detained by security forces in the capital, New Delhi, on Tuesday, October 6, after they protested against the alleged rigging in the elections and demanded removal of the country’s Chief Election Commissioner (CEC) Gyanesh Kumar. 

The Leader of the Opposition Rahul Gandhi and several other MPs also claimed they were manhandled by the police during the detention and forcefully removed from the protests site. All of the detainees were released later.

The protests by the MPs was a part of the ongoing nationwide mobilizations which broke out on Saturday over alleged rigging and irregularities in various elections under the incumbent CEC. The protesters are demanding his immediate removal claiming he manipulated the elections in various states to benefit the ruling party.   

Despite the heavyhandedness of the security forces who have refused to allow any protest gathering in the capital and repeatedly detained opposition leaders, students, and youth group protesters, people turned up on the streets of Delhi and other parts of the country for the consecutive fifth day on Wednesday. 

Several protesters have claimed they were beaten up during detention while some women reporters have claimed they were molested by police personnel on duty during those protests. 

Also on Tuesday, security forces allegedly attacked a cultural gathering organized around the issue by the left-wing Student Federation of India (SFI) in central Delhi. 

On Wednesday, major left and progressive student organizations such as SFI, the All India Students Association (AISA), and the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a movement which emerged in protests demanding reforms in the country’s education system earlier this year, announced a new joint protest beginning from October 10.

Rigging in elections is murdering democracy 

Rahul Gandhi, who is also the leader of India’s main opposition party, the Indian National Congress (INC), claimed around 300 opposition MPs were marching from the country’s Parliament building to the office of the Election Commission of India (ECI), seeking a meeting with the CEC when the security forces stopped them and detained them.

He reiterated that the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), in collaboration with the CEC, has been responsible for destroying democracy in the country by rigging elections. He called the act “treason” and warned that none of the people responsible for “murdering democracy” in the country will be spared whether it is the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Home Minister Amit Shah, or Gyanesh Kumar.

The ultra-right-wing and Hindu-supremacist BJP has been in power since 2014, winning three national elections, including the last one in 2024. It is also ruling a majority of states in India.

Speaking in a press conference in Delhi on Wednesday, Neha Bora, president of AISA and one of the leaders of the movement, claimed that the movement against the manipulations in the national elections by the CEC and the BJP will continue until the removal of Gyanesh Kumar.

Over 130 million Indians have been removed from electoral rolls in the country since the ECI, the highest body responsible for conducting elections in the country, started the so-called Special Intensive Revision (SIR) last year under Gyanesh Kumar’s leadership.

Opposition parties and legal experts have claimed that the SIR is illegal, as it is not mentioned in the ECI rule books and the process was started to manipulate election results to favor the ruling BJP.

A recent report in one of the main English daily paper’s in the country also claimed that most of the decisions taken by Gyanesh Kumar as CEC were illegal.

In the last few weeks, opposition has also alleged that the ECI and BJP collaborated to remove thousands of names, mostly Muslim voters, from the electoral rolls in various constituencies across the country.

Talking to the media on Tuesday, John Britas MP from the Communist Party of India (Marxist) claimed that protests against Gyanesh Kumar are a “historical movement to save democracy” in the country. He accused Kumar, in collaboration with the BJP, of destroying the reputation of India’s electoral process and of being the “real enemy of the nation.”

Britas called for his immediate removal as CEC and demanded he must be tried for his criminal activities.