“SIR radd karo” (scrap SIR) and “Gyanesh Kumar gaddi choro” slogans rang out at Bengaluru’s Freedom Park on Thursday as the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) began its mega protest against the Chief Election Commissioner. Actor-activist Prakash Raj and popular YouTuber Dhruv Rathee joined CJP’s Abhijeet Dipke as the outfit held a “people’s tribunal” over alleged irregularities in the revision of voter lists. A “chappal protest” will follow.
The crowd began to swell from Thursday morning, with several activists and civil society organisations gathering at Freedom Park. Around 1 pm, CJP leaders Dipke, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka arrived at the venue and raised their hands together with Rathee and Prakash Raj on stage, as the crowd shouted anti-Modi and “vote chor, vote chor” slogans.
Prakash Raj calls for scrapping SIR
Addressing the gathering, the Singham actor said the Election Commission of India (ECI) had “insulted the entire country” through the SIR exercise. “In this country, people used to decide who forms the government, but with SIR, the government is deciding who will vote,” Raj said.
Demanding that the SIR exercise be scrapped, which has resulted in the exclusion of over 13 crore people across 20 states and UTs, Raj said the agitation was meant to restore citizens’ rights. “The aim of this protest is not to remove CEC Gyanesh Kumar alone. If he goes, another will replace him. The aim is to scrap the SIR,” he said.
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He also alleged that Kumar was acting at the behest of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Home Minister Amit Shah.
A day before the event, Raj twisted a dialogue from his film Singham to warn the CEC. “Aali re aali, Gyanu, aata tujhi baari aali (Gyanesh Kumar, now it’s your turn),” Raj is heard saying in a video released by Dipke.
The protest comes as the CJP and the Opposition continue to press for the resignation of CEC Gyanesh Kumar over the SIR exercise. The calls have grown louder after an Indian Express exposé revealed that concerns over the deletion and restoration of names were also being raised within the Election Commission itself. The report claimed Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi objected at least 14 times over the past 10 months to various SIR-related decisions by the poll panel.
‘People who are alive are declared dead’
Several people whose names were deleted from the draft rolls during the SIR attended the event at Freedom Park. The CJP claimed they were marked as “shifted” and “absent” even though they have been living at the same place. The purpose of the “people’s tribunal” was to hear the experiences of those removed from the voter lists.
“People who are alive are declared dead. This is the death of democracy,” CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke said. “They call us (youth) cockroaches because they want us to live like a cockroach. But we need to be resilient like a cockroach,” he added.
‘Not here for regime change’: Dhruv Rathee
YouTuber Dhruv Rathee, who called the agitation “a fight to protect democracy”, released a report focusing on SIR irregularities across 100 polling stations in Karnataka, according to The Hindu. Rathee said there was “zero transparency” and “zero accountability” from the ECI over the SIR exercise. “I have not come here for regime change,” said Rathee, who lives in Germany.
After the “tribunal”, the CJP will hold a “chappal protest” in solidarity with women journalists who alleged sexual harassment by a Delhi Police personnel during a protest at Jantar Mantar.
This is the second such protest against Gyanesh Kumar that the CJP has held in the past week. Last week, thousands turned up at the CJP’s agitation at Mumbai’s Shivaji Park. Veteran actors Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah and singer-composer Vishal Dadlani were among those present.
The outfit, which began as a satirical online movement, has also announced plans to return to Jantar Mantar for the third leg of its protest against the CEC. Being dubbed Jantar Mantar 2.0, the site was the epicentre of the massive student protests against exam paper leaks in July. Those protests eventually led to the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan as Union Education Minister.