New Delhi: Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijeet Dipke on Thursday urged people to join the “Lehra do Tiranga” march carrying the national flag at Central Park, Connaught Place, on Friday amid a stand-off with Delhi Police over demonstrations against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.
The NDMC (New Delhi Municipal Council) said Central Park would remain shut on Friday while a Delhi Police officer pointed out that Connaught Place is not a designated site for protests, indicating yet another showdown with the demonstrators.
At a joint press conference held here along with student union representatives from the AISA, SFI, AISF, and political activists, including Prashant Bhushan, Prakash Raj, Anjali Bharadwaj and Nikhil Dey, among others, Dipke urged everyone to join the fight for the right to vote, stressing that ideological differences should be kept aside.
“I request all political parties and civil society groups to rise above ideology and come together. If the right to vote is not saved, democracy will not be saved,” Dipke said.
The CJP founder alleged that the government was protecting Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar amid allegations of irregularities under the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, and pointed out that the nearly 13 crore deletions accounted for almost 14 per cent of the electorate.
The CJP leader pitted that against the backdrop of the 2024 Lok Sabha elections, saying, “The margin of victory in 2024 was just 2 per cent. Over 13 crore voters deleted — around 14 percent.”
“Where 2 per cent is deciding the election, you are deleting 13 crore votes. What is this if not a setting?” he said.
The BJP won 240 of the 543 Lok Sabha seats in 2024 with 36.56 per cent of the votes polled, while the BJP-led National Democratic Alliance (NDA) secured 293 seats to form the government and got around 43 per cent of the votes. The INDIA bloc parties put together polled around 40.6 per cent of votes.
The call for the march came after the arrest of CJP leaders Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, who were sent to five days of judicial custody on Wednesday after entering Jantar Mantar and raising slogans demanding Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation. The arrests came a day after the Union home ministry withdrew Jantar Mantar’s status as a designated protest site, prompting the outfit to challenge the order by returning to the venue with the national flag.
Delhi Police sources said heavy security will be in place in and around Connaught Place and Jantar Mantar ahead of the CJP’s proposed protest on October 16, with several companies of paramilitary forces already stationed in the national capital. Police will deploy personnel at strategic locations, erect barricades and regulate the movement of protesters and commuters to maintain law and order and prevent any untoward incident, a source said.
