Police in the Indian capital detained scores of protesters including founder of the Cockroach Janta Party, Abhijeet Dipke, on Saturday amid patrols by thousands of security forces, with travel and telecoms links suspended, in a lockdown to stop a youth protest asking the election chief to quit. TV channels reported earlier that police officers met Dipke at the Delhi airport after he arrived from the financial capital Mumbai and asked him to call off the protest as authorities had banned it.

CJP leaders Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka were also detained from their flight upon landing, the movement said in a statement. The protest by the "Cockroach" youth movement aims to draw thousands of demonstrators against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over a revision of voter lists that critics say favours Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Television images showed police in the central business district of New Delhi chasing down a few dozen young protesters, some wearing backpacks, before they were loaded into vehicles and hauled away.

About 200 protesters were detained in the area, a police source told Reuters. Those detained outside Delhi included protest supporter Dhruv Rathee, a popular figure on YouTube, a police spokesperson said. With metro stations and markets shut and mobile internet suspended, police boarded buses to check for protesters after stopping them at points of entry into the city, with cars and other vehicles also subjected to checks, Reuters witnesses said. Barricades and concrete blocks stopped traffic, while anti-riot vehicles mounted with tear gas guns were stationed on key routes, they said.

"Why is the prime minister so scared of the country's youth, the country's people?" Abhijeet Dipke, founder of the self-named 'Cockroach Janta Party' that called the protest, asked on Saturday, shortly before leaving for Delhi. "Why did you need to close all the railways, the metro, the internet has been closed, roads have been closed? ... this is nothing but fear," he told the ANI news agency in the financial capital of Mumbai.

Credit: Independent News Pakistan (INP)