India’s Cockroach protests: Rahul Gandhi detained after calling for PM Modi to resign

Indian police have detained opposition leader Rahul Gandhi during spiralling youth-led protests in Delhi, after he called for prime minister Narendra Modi’s resignation.Gandhi, the leader of India’s Congress party, said on Tuesday that Modi must resign “for destroying the future of India’s youth”, before staging a sit-in outside the prime minister’s residence.“The government doesn’t want to take any accountability, nor does it want to have a debate on it in parliament,” said Gandhi on Tuesday. Footage showed police holding the opposition leader by both arms and legs as they pushed through large crowds and into a nearby bus and removed from the area.Chaotic scenes ensued as protesters appeared to try to board the bus as it sped away.Gandhi shared images of his forced removal by security forces and said the demonstration would not stop.Gandhi’s detention came as the Indian capital was rocked by a second day of demonstrations, mobilised by a new youth-led political movement that calls itself the Cockroach Janta party (CJP), which has demanded changes to the country’s education system and the resignation of the education minister after repeated testing scandals.On Tuesday, central Delhi still thronged with thousands of protesters, as an unprecedented expression of dissent against the powerful Modi government showed no sign of abating.Police stand guard at a sit-in protest calling for prime minister Narendra Modi’s resignation outside his residence in Delhi on Tuesday. Photograph: Arun Sankar/AFP/Getty ImagesJust 24 hours earlier, more than 50,000 people took to the streets in protest, many of them in their late teens and early 20s.Modi has not yet directly commented on the protests.On Monday, police fired teargas at protesters and charged with batons, in the capital’s largest demonstrations in five years, while some protesters responded by throwing stones. Police said 60 civilians were injured and another 118 police personnel were hurt.Organisers condemned the “high-handedness” of the authorities and claimed hundreds of protesters had been injured – far more than the police tally. At least one protester was on a ventilator in hospital intensive care on Tuesday.Some protesters had travelled hundreds of miles to join the Delhi protests and said they intended to camp out until the government responded to the demands of the country’s millions of young people. “The government needs to understand: we are not going anywhere,” said Ranjit Verma, 23.“What happened yesterday is our constitution got trampled upon,” Sandeep Dixit, a senior leader of the Congress party, told AFP. “After that, no self-respecting politician or citizen can stand aside.”The CJP has vowed to press on with its demands for Pradhan’s removal, and thousands of protesters remained camped at Delhi’s Jantar Mantar protest site on Tuesday.Allow Instagram content?This article includes content provided by Instagram. We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as they may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'.CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke urged protesters on Tuesday not to lose hope. “They want to break our spirit,” he said, from atop a lorry. “Do not let them silence you.”Parliament was adjourned on Tuesday after the opposition benches demanded a discussion on the alleged “brutality unleashed on students”.The rapidly expanding CJP has won millions of followers on social media since its launch in May, fuelling one of the biggest challenges to Modi since the Hindu nationalist leader won his third term in office in 2024.The movement was born out of repeated school examination scandals that shook confidence in India’s testing system.Some 2.2 million aspiring medical students sat for a re-examination under tight security last month after the previous test was scrapped after the leak of a question paper.That came on top of another scandal related to the online marking of tests taken by nearly two million high school students.Parliamentary Affairs Minister Kiren Rijiju defended the government on Tuesday, saying it had acted swiftly after the exam paper leaks by arresting several people.He said Modi had called for a “foolproof system” to prevent irregularities in the future at a closed-door meeting with his allies.With Agence France-Presse