Police detain protesters during a demonstration demanding the resignation of India's chief election commissioner, in New Delhi, India, October 10, 2026.
(New York) – Indian authorities are using abusive methods to crack down on thousands of peaceful protesters in New Delhi and other Indian cities, Human Rights Watch said today. The protests, led by the Gen Z Cockroach Janta Party, opposition parties, student organizations, and civil society groups, have demanded the resignation of the country’s top election official over alleged wrongdoing and the scrapping of a contentious voter list revision process.
As the protests grew in October 2026, the police have beat protesters, forcibly dragged them on the streets and stuffed them into vans and buses, arbitrarily detained them, imposed excessive restrictions on movement, and suspended mobile internet services. The authorities have also harassed and arbitrarily detained journalists covering the protests.
“Police in Delhi are responding to peaceful protests with seemingly unnecessary or excessive force and have wrongfully detained thousands of people,” said Elaine Pearson, Asia director at Human Rights Watch. “The Modi government should stop throwing young protesters in jail and instead engage with them to address concerns over the right to vote and fairness of elections.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s administration should stop the ill-treatment and arbitrary detention of protesters, allow people to protest peacefully, and restore mobile internet services and freedom of movement, Human Rights Watch said.
Since June 2025, the Election Commission of India has carried out a nationwide Special Intensive Revision (SIR) to clean electoral rolls, ostensibly to remove any dead, duplicate, or ineligible voters. But the process, which has deleted more than 130 million names so far, has been arbitrary and opaque, prompt
