India: Opposition to huddle after Supreme Court march

India’s main opposition leader Rahul Gandhi has invited fellow lawmakers of the INDIA bloc of opposition parties over high tea on Tuesday, news agencies ANI and PTI reported.

The meeting comes after thousands of opposition demonstrators, including activists and civil society members, marched to the Supreme Court on Monday evening in a protest heralded by Gandhi and the INDIA bloc.

Monday’s large demonstration was the latest in a series of protests the world’s largest democracy has been witnessing over an alleged manipulation of voter rolls.

India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar has come under public and opposition ire, with calls for him to resign amplifying, after a report last month found that Kumar took alleged unilateral decisions that resulted in a mass deletion of voters, allegedly violating the law.

Around 130 million names have been struck off so far from electoral rolls under the process called Special Intensive Revision (SIR), which began last year.

Critics say the exercise favors Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata (BJP).

The Election Commission of India and the BJP deny the allegations.

Kumar and Modi have not yet given a statement on the issue.

On Saturday, another protest called by the youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) movement was thwarted by a mammoth deployment of police and paramilitary, leading to mass detentions,

BJP has slammed the CJP and INDIA bloc as ‘anarchists’.

“There are no parallel protests. It’s one protest, and it’s a protest where everybody is standing together. Every single person is going to stand against these killers of our Constitution, these killers of our democracy. And we’re not going to back down,” Gandhi wrote on X after the rally.

Monday’s opposition protest, that snaked through a heavily barricaded part of central Delhi, culminated with the opposition filing a joint petition in the Supreme Court against the SIR and the alleged irregularities.

On Tuesday, the opposition MPs are expected to discuss further plans in their joint protest, PTI reported.