On a chaotic Saturday in Delhi, the police reportedly detained more than 7,000 protesters demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

Smaller protests were also held in Mumbai, Pune and Bengaluru calling for Kumar to resign over concerns about the Election Commission’s handling of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls that deleted 13 crore names from the draft list.

Three Scroll staffers were among the journalists from at least six publications who were taken into custody while covering the protests. All the Scroll staffers have since been released.

Ahead of a protest called by the Cockroach Janta Party political campaign and Left-affiliated youth groups at Jantar Mantar on Saturday, the authorities had turned the national capital into a fortress.

Barricades were erected everywhere, mobile internet was suspended in central Delhi, 45 metro stations were closed and more than 250 trains cancelled.

The day started with leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party, including its founder Abhijeet Dipke, being detained in Delhi inside the plane in which they had flown in for the demonstration. In Gurugram, YouTuber Dhruv Rathee was also detained.

As protesters gathered in pockets of Delhi, they were promptly detained by the police. The Opposition described the situation as being “worse than the Emergency” imposed by Indira Gandhi in 1975.

A similar fate awaited Opposition leaders, including four former chief ministers: Mamata Banerjee of West Bengal, Arvind Kejriwal of New Delhi, Pinarayi Vijayan of Keralam and Manik Sarkar of Tripura.

Taken into custody along with Vijayan were other Communist Party of India (Marxist) leaders, including MA Baby, Brinda Karat and Rajya Sabha MP John Brittas. They were taken to the Chhatrasal Stadium, along with other detainees, the party said.

Rajya Sabha MP Derek O’Brien and Saket Gokhale of the Mamata Banerjee faction of the Trinamool Congress were detained along with their party leader.

Lawyers who were holding a march against the voter roll revision were detained near the gate of the Supreme Court.

In the afternoon, when it became clear that it would be impossible to access Jantar Mantar, All India Students’ Association head Neha Bora called on protesters to gather at the Dilli Haat shopping complex instead.

As she and others marched there, Bora, advocate Prashant Bhushan and activist Yogendra Yadav were detained. So too were protesters who had gathered near Dilli Haat.

Among the journalists who were detained in Delhi were Scroll’s Ayush Tiwari and Shoaib Daniyal. Divya Aslesha was detained while covering a protest in Pune.

Tiwari was detained when he was filming the police detain protesters near ITO. He was wearing his press card. But the police told Tiwari that “everybody claims to be a journalist these days, you are no different”.

He was able to step free after the bus in which he and other protestors were being taken to a police station began to emit smoke. 

Daniyal was picked up while waiting for a taxi more than 20 km away from the Jantar Mantar protest site. The police clicked a picture of his Aadhaar card and noted his address, before detaining him.

The police also tried to force Daniyal to delete the videos on his phone that he had shot during his detention.

The Pune Police tried to drag Aslesha into custody twice, despite her showing them her press card and screaming amid the chaos that she was a reporter. The third time, they detained her.

Despite our journalists being arbitrarily detained, we continued to cover the protest. But we count on reader support to keep going. Support independent media. Sign up for a Scroll membership.

Follow Scroll’s coverage of the special intensive revision of electoral rolls here.