INDIA bloc stages mega Delhi rally today over voter-roll revision, demanding election chief's resignation
Opposition leaders and supporters are gathering in Delhi on Sunday for a march to Ramlila Maidan and a rally demanding Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar's resignation over alleged large-scale voter deletions in the electoral roll revision.
India's opposition INDIA bloc is holding a mega rally in Delhi on Sunday, 1 November, in a show of strength against alleged irregularities in the revision of electoral rolls and to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. The mobilisation, billed as 'Chalo Dilli' and 'Vote Bachao, Desh Bachao', centres on a march from the Minto Road-Connaught Place junction at noon to Ramlila Maidan, where the rally is scheduled to run from 10am to 5pm.
By Sunday morning the stage at Ramlila Maidan was set, with a large tricolour canopy over the main stage, separate arrangements for representatives of the bloc's parties, and security preparations in place. Leaders and supporters from different states were beginning to reach the capital, and live updates in the morning reported hundreds of people from Himachal Pradesh arriving in Delhi to take part. Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge, Leader of the Opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi and Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav are among the leaders expected at the march and rally, alongside student groups, civil society organisations, workers, women and youth.
At the heart of the protest is the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of voter lists. The INDIA bloc alleges that the exercise has led to large-scale deletions from electoral rolls, which it describes as 'vote chori', or vote theft, and it is demanding both a halt to the SIR and the resignation of the chief election commissioner. In Saturday's symbolic proceedings, the bloc's leaders adopted a motion by a show of hands levelling six charges against Kumar, including conspiring with the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to steal elections, deleting 13.2 crore voters through the SIR, and acting at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah. Those are the bloc's allegations; the Election Commission has not, in the reporting seen for this post, accepted them.
The rally follows a symbolic 'public impeachment' of Kumar held on Saturday at Kharge's residence, at which voters gave accounts of names they said had been deleted from rolls during the SIR. The event had originally been scheduled for Friday but was postponed because of heavy rain in the capital. Left leaders also spoke on Saturday, with CPI(M) MP John Brittas alleging that even elected representatives were being made to establish their eligibility to vote, and accusing the commission of eroding electoral democracy through the revision exercise.
The bloc's campaign has also drawn on a report in The Indian Express, cited in Sunday's live coverage, that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi raised objections on several occasions over the past ten months to decisions and orders, most of them concerning the SIR process. That report forms part of the opposition's argument that concern about the revision is not confined to political parties, although the commission's own account of its internal deliberations has not been set out in the same coverage.
Delhi Police has put an extensive security and traffic plan in place for the day. More than 4,000 police and paramilitary personnel have been deployed, around 200 CCTV cameras have been installed, and a dedicated control room has been set up inside Ramlila Maidan to monitor the venue. Traffic restrictions and diversions across parts of central Delhi remain in force from 10am to 5pm, with commuters advised to avoid stretches around ITO, Delhi Gate, Rajghat, Ajmeri Gate and Turkman Gate, and diversions planned on routes including Bahadur Shah Zafar Marg, Jawaharlal Nehru Marg, Minto Road and Desh Bandhu Gupta Road as the march proceeds.
How large the gathering will be is, for now, a matter of competing estimates rather than a settled figure. Opposition leaders have projected a turnout of up to 10 lakh people, while Delhi Police has estimated that around 50,000 people may attend. The gap between those figures is itself part of the politics of the day: a large turnout would strengthen the bloc's claim to be speaking for a broad public grievance, while a smaller one would leave its opponents arguing that the campaign has limited reach beyond party cadres.
Rahul Gandhi has urged people coming for the march to support Delhi traders on the occasion of Diwali, a message reported in Sunday morning's live updates and aimed at linking the protest to the city's shopkeepers as well as to voters. Support has also come from civic groups and student organisations including the All India Students' Association, widening the mobilisation beyond the bloc's parliamentary parties to civic and campus groups.
The protest has already drawn a sharp response from the ruling alliance's side. The Janata Dal (United) on Saturday called the bloc's public impeachment exercise a 'drama' and accused the Congress of attempting to push the country towards anarchy. Kharge, for his part, demanded on Saturday not only Kumar's immediate removal but also the scrapping of the 2023 law governing the appointment of election commissioners and granting them immunity, a demand that goes beyond the fate of one official to the rules under which the commission itself is constituted.
What happens next will be watched on several fronts. The speeches at Ramlila Maidan will show how far the bloc goes in framing the SIR dispute as a wider question of democratic legitimacy, and whether its leaders announce any further programme beyond Sunday's rally. Attention will also turn to any response from the Election Commission or the government, to whether the march and rally pass off peacefully under the heavy security deployment, and to whether the dispute over voter lists, which has already dominated the opposition's recent campaigning, becomes a sustained issue in the weeks ahead or fades after a single day of protest.
