Three female journalists have accused Delhi police officers of sexual harassment during street protests, opening a new front in India’s voter rolls standoff, a dispute with significant implications for the country’s electoral market of confidence and governance.
The complaints were filed on Saturday, after the force detained scores of young people calling for the resignation of chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. In a social media post, Delhi Police said its New Delhi District had received the complaint and transferred it to its crime branch for a “fair and impartial” inquiry. The accusations include inappropriate touching by some officers.
The Press Club of India, the professional body representing the press, demanded immediate action, saying it was “shocked and dismayed” by the treatment of journalists. “Behaviour of this kind cannot be normalised in a democracy. Journalists must be allowed to work freely, without fear, and document those who gather to raise various issues,” it said in a statement.
Meanwhile, the protests themselves are rooted in a contested administrative exercise with far-reaching consequences. Thousands of demonstrators gathered in Delhi and Mumbai for a third day on Sunday, demanding that Kumar step down over large-scale changes to voter rolls. The Election Commission says the revision is intended to remove duplicate and ineligible entries, and so far 130 million names have been struck off the voters’ list. It says the last revision was done nearly a quarter of a century ago, and that the list needs updating to account for people who have died, left the country, or are registered in more than one place after moving to a new address.
Protesters, however, say the revision will benefit Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Opposition parties have accused Kumar of manipulating the voters’ list to favour the BJP during elections. Both the BJP and the Election Commission have rejected those accusations. Opposition leader Rahul Gandhi said women fear for their safety and that the home ministry must “answer for this”.
The controversy has been mired in dispute from the start. The latest protests were called after a report in The Indian Express said that Kumar’s two fellow election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions and orders they said had been issued without their knowledge. Those differences were reported to be mostly over the controversial revision of the country’s electoral rolls, known as the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, which began last year.
The Election Commission has defended its way of working, saying in a statement that “differing views” were part of the “decision-making process” and that all decisions were taken unanimously. But the revelations sparked a furore, with opposition leaders demanding Kumar’s resignation.
Among those mobilised are supporters of the influential Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a pressure group that began as an online satirical movement. The CJP recorded its first major victory in July, when it forced the then Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign after weeks of protests calling for education reforms.
The tension on the streets has been visible. Videos online show people being physically dragged away from the Jantar Mantar protest site in central Delhi. “Police dragged me by my hair,” Aahna Singh, an activist and student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, told Reuters news agency during the protests. She said the police were resorting to “brutality”.
For investors and market-watchers, the episode underscores the political risk surrounding India’s electoral administration: a dispute over the integrity of the voter list, involving 130 million removed entries and internal objections at the Election Commission itself, now sits at the centre of a confrontation that has drawn in the press, the police and the opposition. The full reference report is available at https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9e8lvm6nrr3o.
The outcome of the crime branch inquiry into the journalists’ complaints, and of the demands for Kumar’s resignation, will signal how the state balances protest, press freedom and electoral administration in the months ahead.