By Sumayya
Indian police briefly kept opposition head Rahul Gandhi on Tuesday during a protest march to demand the exit of the land’s voting chief over a massive rewrite of voter lists.
An AFP reporter observed Gandhi, a chief leader of the main opposition Congress Party, standing on a police barrier and waving the national flag.
Officers kept him along with alternate lawmakers but let them go soon after.
The rewrite of voter lists has drawn complaints over alleged errors in the choice-making track, with opposition politicians blaming the voting body of performing at the wish of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Critics likewise say the drive has deeply altered marginalized and minority groups, especially Muslims.
The Election Commission of India has turned down claims of wrongdoing, saying the rewrite track remains targeted at ensuring the correctness and wholeness of voting rolls.
On Tuesday, opposition members launched a march from parliament toward the body’s head office, but were stopped by a heavy police presence.
Gandhi and his lawmaker sister Priyanka Gandhi Vadra later stayed inside the public radio’s offices next to the voting body.
“The land has been hijacked by Narendra Modi through vote theft,” Gandhi informed reporters from behind the iron gates of the public radio building.
“What has been performed to our land is called betrayal. Nobody remains going to escape.”
Modi’s group has backed the drive.
“Some opposition groups, particularly the Congress, remain making a shared action to shift the state and place Rahul Gandhi in power,” group speaker Sambit Patra informed reporters Tuesday.
“They remain deliberately hitting India’s democracy and constitutional bodies.”
‘It’s done, bro’
The protest remains part of a broader campaign against rewrite of voting rolls, restarted by a record last month by The Indian Express newspaper.
The record expressed that two of the voting body’s three members had formally fought at minimum 14 times to top choices linked to the rewrite, and that the names of 130 million citizens had been wiped since the work launched in 2025.
Protests launched on Friday, demanding that body chief Gyanesh Kumar step away.
“Gyanesh, it’s done, bro,” posters read at the protest on Tuesday, alongside signs claiming voting cheating.
Opposition leaders pressed their demands for greater openness, claiming that shifts to the voter rolls could strip eligible voters of their rights.
Kumar has not commented openly.
The voting body says the rewrite work remains intended to spot falsely signed voters and block “outside illegal immigrants” from voting.
The youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a funny political movement that came up online in May and won in its campaign to throw out the then schooling minister, has called for “mass gatherings” in the capital on Saturday.
Major student groups linked with left-wing factions have likewise expressed they would join Saturday’s protest.
India’s Supreme Court on Monday ordered the state and the voting body to explain choices linked to the rewrite work. Another hearing remains expected to take place upcoming week.
