India’s Gen Z youth flock to streets over voter roll purge
Tens of thousands have taken to the streets in New Delhi in recent weeks as India’s youth-led “cockroach” movement have launched another wave of demonstrations — this time over a purge of voter rolls.
A sweeping and controversial revision of the electoral rolls deleted 130 million of India’s more than 900 million eligible voters. The Election Commission of India says the deleted are dead, duplicates, people who had moved, or people it couldn’t trace. But protesters say the deletions disproportionately affected minorities, particularly Muslims, and helped Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s party make gains in recent state elections.
The commission and Modi’s political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, both deny any bias.
The government answered the latest protests with a lockdown, shutting down internet around protest sites, cancelling trains to New Delhi and detaining thousands of protesters including young students, opposition leaders, lawyers and journalists.
The protest movement is called the Cockroach Janta Party, whose name is a play on an insult from the country’s chief justice, who likened unemployed young people to cockroaches. They first took to the streets this summer over leaked exam papers and education reforms. Eventually, the education minister resigned.
Now, they’re are demanding the resignation of the chief election commissioner.
Zeba Warsi has the latest from New Delhi.
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