Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of India's youth protest movement known as the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), has been detained in Delhi again. Police picked him up before a planned march in the heart of the capital, and by the time the day was over, the city looked more like a military camp than the busy commercial hub it normally is. Dipke was arrested just as he was about to get into his vehicle, and this was the second time in less than a week that he had been taken away by police.
The march was meant to take place on Friday. The CJP had called on its supporters to come to Connaught Place, one of Delhi's busiest shopping and business areas, to wave the Indian flag. The police, however, had already warned the group not to hold the march without permission.
They said earlier demonstrations by the movement had turned violent and damaged property, and they worried that a big crowd in Connaught Place would block traffic, hurt businesses, and stop emergency vehicles from getting through. To make sure nobody tried anyway, thousands of security personnel were deployed across the city.
To understand why this matters, you have to know where the CJP came from. The movement started as an online campaign in May, after India's chief justice compared some unemployed young people to cockroaches. Instead of being insulted and staying quiet, Dipke took the insult and turned it into a rallying cry. Within a few months, the group had grown into a serious force.
By July, it was drawing thousands of young people onto the streets, mostly over leaked examination papers. One march towards Parliament ended in clashes with police, and the pressure grew so much that India's education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan, eventually resigned. That is a big deal in any country, and it showed everyone that this young movement could actually move the government.
These days, the CJP is not only fighting about exam papers. Its biggest demand now is for the resignation of India's Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar. The group says the Election Commission has been manipulating voter lists to favour Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
The heart of the complaint is a nationwide exercise called Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, which is a big clean-up of electoral rolls. Critics say the exercise has removed more than 130 million names from the voter lists, and that many legitimate voters could lose their right to vote because of it. The Election Commission and the government both deny these claims.
Anyone who has followed Kenyan politics will recognise the fear behind this. In Kenya, we have had many long arguments about voter registration, missing names, and whether the electoral body can be trusted.
So when a young Indian movement says its voters are being quietly erased, it is not a strange story for us. It is a story about the basic question of whether your vote will still count on election day.
The police have been very firm this time. Last Saturday, officers boarded Dipke's plane shortly after it landed in Delhi and took him away before he could reach a planned demonstration. He was released the following day. Two other CJP leaders, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, were not so lucky. They were arrested after they went into Jantar Mantar, a historic site that police had recently removed from the list of approved protest venues.
Jantar Mantar is an 18th-century observatory built to study the stars, and it sits right beside Parliament. For decades, it has been one of the most recognisable places in India for people to publicly complain about the government.
The CJP says the police moved the protest site away from the seat of power so that demonstrations would be less visible and easier to ignore. The police say Das and Ranka climbed over a locked gate and broke the conditions of their release. The two were sent to jail for five days in judicial custody.
Before Friday's march, Dipke made a video message that went around social media. He told supporters who could not travel to Delhi to raise the Indian flag in their own towns and cities. He also said he might be jailed again, but he was not worried. In his words, the tricolour was his pride, and he would raise it.
That line has become something of a slogan for the group. Their social media posts say that waving the Tiranga is not a crime, and they encouraged supporters to take photographs with the flag and share them online.
On the day itself, the police response was massive. Tens of thousands of police and paramilitary personnel had spread across Delhi. They sealed roads, shut metro stations, and stopped protesters long before they could get anywhere close to Jantar Mantar. Authorities also closed Central Park for two days, citing what they called administrative reasons.
Police said they could let a small group wave the flag and sing the national anthem at another location, but they were not going to allow a large crowd. By the time the protest was supposed to begin, only about 200 to 300 people had gathered near Central Park. They were not allowed to enter, so they moved around the outside of the park, waving flags and shouting slogans until they were dispersed.
The scenes captured by the BBC and other journalists were hard to watch. Reporters saw dozens of people detained, including students and even journalists. In videos from across the city, protesters could be seen shouting as officers grabbed them by the arms, dragged them across the pavement, and pushed them into waiting buses. One of the buses reportedly held about 50 female police officers, and the BBC said some young male protesters were shoved into the same bus.
There were also claims that some protesters were assaulted by police, and the BBC captured footage of an officer slapping a detained protester inside a bus. The Delhi Police did not respond to questions about the use of force. They defended their actions as necessary to maintain public order and stop unauthorised gatherings.
Among those detained was Neha Bora, a prominent leader of the left-wing All India Students' Association, or AISA. She has become one of the faces of the recent protests, and she was also arrested during last Saturday's crackdown.
Anish Gawande, an opposition politician at whose house Dipke had been staying, questioned why police had detained a man who was simply walking with the national flag in his hand. "It is a bit of a joke," he said. Police have not yet publicly explained the exact legal grounds for Dipke's detention.
Dipke himself had told the public that he expected to be arrested again. He had seen what happened to his colleagues, and he had made his peace with it. The police, for their part, say their job is to stop what they see as an illegal gathering in a sensitive area of the capital.
Both sides are dug in. The government and the Election Commission say the CJP is breaking the rules and using young people to create chaos. The CJP says it is peaceful, that it is only asking for a fair vote, and that the state is afraid of ordinary young people with flags.
The CJP is not fighting alone, although it has its own separate path. India's opposition parties have also been protesting, and they too accuse the Election Commission of manipulating voter rolls to help the BJP. Last week, opposition leader Rahul Gandhi and other lawmakers tried to march to the commission's headquarters in Delhi, but they were stopped by police and detained.
After that, opposition politicians took their complaints to President Droupadi Murmu and marched towards the Supreme Court. Student groups have also joined the protests. Although the CJP, the students, and the opposition have mostly protested separately, their demands have started to look more and more alike. Gandhi has publicly condemned the arrests of CJP organisers and called for Jantar Mantar to be reopened to peaceful demonstrators.
The scale of the crackdown has drawn wide anger. The CJP has compared the police action to India's Emergency period, between 1975 and 1977, when civil liberties were suspended and thousands of political opponents were jailed. That comparison is strong, and it is meant to be. Many Indians remember the Emergency as one of the darkest chapters in their democracy, and nobody wants to see that come back.
Still, it is important to say that the government has not declared any emergency, and the police insist they are following the law. Whether the crackdown is necessary or excessive will depend on how the courts see it, and on what the public decides after watching the footage for themselves.
What makes this story important for us in Kenya and other parts of the world is how familiar it feels. We have seen young people take to the streets over things that hit them directly, like jobs, taxes, and fair elections. We have seen the police respond with force, and we have seen the arguments about who is really breaking the law.
We have also seen how quickly a slogan can spread when young people feel ignored. Whatever happens to the CJP in the coming weeks, the questions it is raising about voting rights and public space will not go away. They are the same questions millions of people across the world are asking today.
As Dipke remains in custody, and his supporters are watching closely to see whether the courts will step in. Das and Ranka are serving their jail terms. Another organiser, Ajinkya Shinde, was released on bond after agreeing to keep the peace and maintain good behaviour. Delhi's streets have slowly returned to normal, but the heavy security presence is still visible around Connaught Place and the government buildings. The coming days will tell us whether this is the end of a single protest or the start of something much bigger.
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