Voters display their identity cards as they wait in line to cast ballots during the second and final phase of Rajasthan’s urban local body elections in Jaipur, India, on September 11, 2026.
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The Cockroach Janta Party, a viral pseudo-political movement associated with the Gen Z protests that unsettled Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government in July, is calling for India’s chief election commissioner to step down. The group accuses him of damaging the country’s democratic process.
CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke said Friday that the organization would launch protests across India on Oct. 2 unless the chief election commissioner resigns by Saturday.
Speaking at a news conference Thursday, Dipke described Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar as “the biggest threat to India’s democracy.” He also questioned Kumar’s involvement in a recent revision of the electoral rolls, a process that reportedly removed millions of names from voter lists.
Dipke argued that the revision has effectively allowed the government to determine who is eligible to vote, reversing the democratic principle that voters should decide who governs them.
India’s three-member Election Commission is selected through a government-backed process involving the prime minister, the home minister and the opposition leader. The main opposition party, the Indian National Congress, reportedly objected to Kumar’s appointment as head of the poll panel last year.
Voter roll revisions
The Election Commission began a nationwide exercise last year known as “special intensive revisions,” or SIR, to update voter rolls. Officials said the initiative was intended to produce lists that were accurate, current and free of duplicate or ineligible entries, while ensuring that no qualified voter was excluded.
But reports in the Indian media earlier this month said millions of names had disappeared from draft electoral rolls. Rahul Gandhi, India’s opposition leader and a longtime critic of what he calls “vote theft,” joined the CJP on Thursday in demanding Kumar’s resignation.
Questions from Modi’s political opponents intensified after an investigation published by The Indian Express on Wednesday reported that the Election Commission’s two other members had submitted 14 formal complaints about irregularities in the SIR process over the past 10 months.
According to the report, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi said they had not been adequately informed about the addition of voters or the removal of names. They also raised concerns about the reliability of the voter-management software and warned that centralizing access to the voter database in New Delhi could sideline state officials.
The Election Commission sought to minimize the significance of the objections in a statement Wednesday. “Differing views and observations are a normal part of deliberation in any institution,” it said, describing them as part of the organization’s decision-making process.
The commission has not yet responded to calls for the chief election commissioner to resign or to reports that 130 million voters were removed from the draft electoral rolls.
The voter-list revision began last year in Bihar, where Modi and his allies later secured a decisive victory, taking more than 200 of the state assembly’s 243 seats.
Concerns about Modi’s political standing grew after his party failed to win an outright majority in India’s June 2024 national election. He was forced to rely on coalition partners to form a government and begin a third term as prime minister.
Since then, victories in important state elections have eased speculation that Modi was losing momentum. After elections earlier this year, his Bharatiya Janata Party formed a government in West Bengal for the first time.
