The opposition coalition Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (INDIA, by its acronym in English) will lead a major protest this Sunday in which it hopes to bring together more than 50,000 attendees, with the aim of displaying rejection of the administration of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and denouncing alleged anomalies in the voter census.
The march has been called just one day after the judicial hearing against the chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, over the alleged irregularities in the register. The criticism focuses on the agency’s plan to suppress around 150 million registrations under the pretext of updating the electoral roll after deaths and changes of residence, a decision that the INDIA alliance considers designed to favor Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) at the ballot box.
"There is enormous anger, enormous emotional pain, because millions of people are being deprived of their rights. They are stealing their vote. We defend the vote, which is the expression of all Indians," the opposition leader, Rahul Gandhi, clarified before the mobilization.
Along the same lines, Gandhi has asserted that Kumar "will not survive" and that his party has "enough evidence to ensure that the commissioner does not remain in office".
"If the BJP insists on keeping him even after we reveal (the incriminating evidence against Kumar), its game will be clear to everyone," he warned, according to the newspaper 'The Indian Express'. In response, the BJP has maintained that the opposition can continue presenting its leader as its "make-believe prime minister".
The Indian Youth Congress has announced that the demonstrators will be dressed in white to resemble "ghosts", in allusion to voters who would have been declared dead or removed from the electoral roll. At the same time, a large security operation has been planned with more than 3,000 police officers and 10,000 military personnel, tasked not only with guarding the site of the rally, but also with preventing the crowd from dispersing and moving toward the Jantar Mantar observatory, one of the historical sites of New Delhi.
In addition, the Roaches Party -- a satirical political movement and student protest driven by Generation Z -- has expressed its support for the call.
The controversy dates back to September, when 'The Indian Express' revealed in an investigation that Kumar would have adopted key decisions about the electoral process without the consensus of the other two commissioners, who registered objections on more than a dozen occasions. The Election Commission of India, responsible for organizing the votes in the most populous nation on the planet, has rejected all the accusations directed against the institution.
Despite the fact that Modi has remained during most of his term as the country's most popular national leader, his Executive has had to face several mass protests. Among them are the mobilizations with fatalities against the Citizenship Amendment Law –which accelerated the granting of nationality to non-Muslim immigrants– and the prolonged farmers' strike, which lasted for a year.