The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) said on Tuesday that three of its leaders were detained with other members as they were trying to reach Jantar Mantar in capital New Delhi on Tuesday. 

Ashutosh Ranka, Saurav Das and Ajinkya Shinde, who have been among the main faces of the CJP’s anti-election chief protest, were among those detained, the collective’s founder Abhijeet Dipke said on X.

A video shared by Dipke purportedly shows CJP’s activists scaling a gate with yellow police barricades on the other side and holding up the Indian national flag. They are then seen being chased and grabbed by police officials amid slogans of ‘Gyanesh Kumar, resign’.

The detentions come a day after Jantar Mantar was delisted as the capital’s designated protest site.

On Saturday, the CJP had called for a protest march to Jantar Mantar demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Police denied authorisation for the protest and thousands, including CJP and student leaders, were detained. 

The demonstrators decried the detentions, saying protest was a fundamental right.

Dipke, Das and Ranka were detained from an airplane as soon as they landed in New Delhi. They were released after spending nearly 24 hours in detention and vowed for a continued protest. 

The CJP had given a 24-hour ultimatum to the Delhi Police on Monday to fix a date and time for the Jantar Mantar protest, before the site was delisted. 

“You cannot denotify the resistance,” Dipke said in his Tuesday post on X, tagging Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

Jantar Mantar was also the ground-zero for the CJP in its debut agitation over India’s examination system in July that forced Modi’s education minister to step down, in a rare concession by the Modi government.

DW