Mass Protests Erupt in New Delhi: Electoral Roll Purge Affects 130 Million; Police Detain Approximately 6,000

According to NPR, parts of India's capital New Delhi have been placed under lockdown. On October 10, thousands of protesters took to the streets to oppose the Election Commission of India's massive revision of the national electoral rolls. Security forces set up roadblocks at designated protest sites, cut internet access in parts of New Delhi, and detained approximately 6,000 people, according to The Indian Express.

The scale of this electoral roll revision is almost unprecedented in global electoral history. The Election Commission of India announced last year that it would update the rolls by purging voters who had died, relocated, or been absent for extended periods. The ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party framed the effort as a drive to weed out so-called illegal immigrants. Yet out of approximately 980 million registered voters, approximately 130 million names have been deleted or face the threat of deletion.

Kaostubh Chatuvidi, a lawyer handling the case and opposing the special roll revision, told NPR: "By such a wide margin, this is the largest-scale disenfranchisement in history."

Critics charge that the Modi administration is in effect targeting the Muslim minority and other groups unlikely to support the ruling party, using administrative means to systematically strip them of their voting rights. The Election Commission has issued a statement saying that everything it has done is lawful, and has asked local officials to check whether any voters have been wrongly removed. But the prime minister himself has yet to comment. Protesters accuse him of hiding behind the police and are demanding the resignation of the Election Commission's chief commissioner.

In the face of the protest wave, the government's response has been an across-the-board crackdown. NPR reporter Diaa Hadid reported from New Delhi that security forces set up roadblocks around designated protest sites, cut internet access in parts of the city, and broadcast the following warning over loudspeakers on a loop: "Attention, attention, gathering is not permitted here."

Despite this, protesters—predominantly young—kept surfacing at different locations, while police continued to conduct detentions. Those detained include protest leaders, who were taken from their seats as soon as they stepped off planes, as well as dozens of lawyers and journalists. A lawyer hiding in a courthouse under the pseudonym Deepankur, for security reasons, told NPR: "I have never noticed detentions of lawyers on such a scale before. This is unprecedented."

Many of those arrested were taken to a stadium, which police used as a temporary detention center. NPR reported that police also detained journalists, and at one intersection witnessed riot police blowing whistles and charging at a young man alleged to have shouted anti-government slogans.

By afternoon, the protesters eventually gathered on a bridge, shouting Indian leftist slogans such as "Delhi belongs to all of us."

Regarding the figure of 130 million, the exact proportion between those directly deleted and those asked to provide supplementary documentation, as well as the subsequent handling of those detained, remains unclear in existing reporting.