Rahul Gandhi Marches to Supreme Court Over Voter Roll Fraud — SkimNews
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- Rahul Gandhi and Congress President Mallikarjun Kharge filed a petition to the Supreme Court challenging a voter roll revision that removed tens of millions of names, alleging it benefits PM Modi's BJP.
- Chief Justice Surya Kant called the matter sub judice but assured Gandhi's petition "shall be heard at the earliest possible opportunity, in accordance with the law."
- Delhi police cancelled trains, shut dozens of metro stations, and deployed tens of thousands of security personnel over the weekend, detaining thousands of protesters before they could reach Jantar Mantar.
- The Home Ministry announced demonstrations will no longer be permitted at Jantar Mantar, the capital's best-known protest site, and listed three alternative venues.
- Reporters Without Borders condemned the detention of at least 16 Indian journalists, while BBC footage captured a policeman slapping a detained protester inside a bus.
- CJP pressure group leaders Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das, and Ashutosh Ranka were dramatically detained from a plane upon landing in Delhi to join the weekend protest, then released a day later.
- BJP President Nitin Nabin accused opposition parties and the CJP of trying to destabilise India "at the behest of foreign forces" without naming them.
Why it matters: The Election Commission and BJP flatly reject fraud allegations, but the sheer scale — tens of millions of names struck from voter rolls in the world's largest democracy — turns a procedural dispute into a legitimacy crisis. By pre-emptively blocking access to Jantar Mantar and detaining journalists, the government is losing the optics war while opposition leader Gandhi lands a formal petition before the country's top court.
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