India's opposition marches against the election chief
Rahul Gandhi led a column toward the court in New Delhi, and police stopped it short. The fight over voter rolls remains open.
Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi, of the Congress party, led a column of marchers through New Delhi on Monday toward the Supreme Court. They are demanding the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, head of the Election Commission, the body that runs elections in the world's most populous democracy. According to Al Jazeera, his sister Priyanka, several lawmakers from the INDIA bloc and the youth movement "Cockroach Janta Party" marched with him. Gandhi said of Kumar: "We will not spare you".
Police did not let the column reach the court. Some protesters jumped the first barricade. A confrontation was expected at the second, and it was avoided when the leaders announced they had already handed in their petition. Al Jazeera counts more than 30 000 police officers in the capital.
Authorities closed six metro stations and deployed federal forces, according to Outlook India. Before the column set out, Chief Justice Surya Kant replied that he already had the opposition's letter and could not receive the delegation, though "the doors of the Supreme Court are open to everyone," reported The Free Press Journal.
The dispute stems from the "Special Intensive Revision" of the voter rolls, which began in the state of Bihar after an order dated June 24, 2025, according to the site Indoneo. The opposition accuses the commission of favoring the BJP, the governing party, which denies it.
Protesters say the commission has removed more than 130 million names, a figure Al Jazeera reports and the commission has not broken down. The commission says it removed only the dead, duplicates, people who moved and people it could not locate.
Bhupinder Singh Hooda, a Congress leader, said the protest will continue until Kumar resigns. The sources consulted show no response yet from the commission or the BJP to the march, nor a reliable count of people detained on Monday.
