Thousands of ‘cockroach’ protesters are set to return to the streets of Delhi on Friday, days after police prevented their last mass demonstration and two of their leaders were jailed.
The Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a youth-led movement seeking electoral reforms, has called on supporters to gather at Central Park in Connaught Place, a busy commercial district.
The call follows the jailing of two CJP leaders for five days after they entered Jantar Mantar, a protest site recently declared off-limits by police.
What began as a campaign against alleged electoral fraud has since become a wider fight over the right to protest. Central Park is not an approved protest venue either.
On Thursday evening, Delhi police warned protesters to stay away from Connaught Place, saying orders restricting public gatherings were already in place and anyone breaking them could face legal action.
Authorities also said the venue Central Park, a leafy public space surrounded by Connaught Place’s white colonial-era buildings, would be closed for two days for “administrative reasons”. Police said they were willing to allow a small group to wave the national flag and sing the national anthem somewhere else.
But CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke has shown no sign of backing down. He has called the protest Lehra Do Tiranga, or Wave the Tricolour, as many Indians informally refer to the country’s orange-white-green flag as Tiranga. Dipke has said he is prepared to risk arrest himself.
Whether his supporters can reach the park is another question. Police barricades and mass detentions kept many away from last Saturday’s demonstration. This time, Dipke has urged those unable to reach Delhi to raise the Indian flag and protest wherever they are.
The CJP has come a long way from May, when the movement began with an insult. After India’s chief justice likened some unemployed young people to cockroaches, Dipke embraced the label and turned it into an online protest movement.
By July, he and his supporters were filling the streets over examination paper leaks, in protests that forced India’s education minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign. Within months, the “cockroaches” had become one of the most visible expressions of youth anger at Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government.
Now they are taking on something bigger – India’s elections.
Source: www.bbc.co.uk
