The three leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party, a popular youth movement in India, were freed on Sunday, a day after police officers detained them as they prepared to lead a protest against sweeping revisions to the country’s electoral rolls. Ratna Singh, a Cockroach leader who acts as the group’s legal director, said on social media that the three leaders had been released on the condition that they do not commit “any violation of the peace for one year.” silence order. It was also not known whether the leaders – Abhijeet Dipke, who created the Cucaracha movement, along with Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka – would appear on the second day of protests that his party and other activist groups called for on Sunday. The group said it would hold a news conference on Sunday afternoon. The three men greeted journalists gathered outside the police station as they were quickly loaded into a black vehicle and driven away. Mr. Dipke was seen wearing the same T-shirt he had on Saturday, with an image of Mohandas K. Gandhi, India’s nonviolent protest leader. “Cockroaches never die,” declared the group’s X account, minutes after its release. It included a cockroach emoji. The arrest of the three men on Saturday was part of an extraordinary show of force by Indian security officials, who rounded up thousands of would-be protesters and packed them into buses and vans. Trains to the capital were cancelled, metro stations were closed and the internet was cut in much of New Delhi. Undeterred, thousands of people, mostly in their 20s and 30s, held demonstrations in various parts of the city, only to be confronted by walls of security forces. The protests are a response to what the Cucaracha party and others have called a politically motivated purge of the electoral roll. That review, which began last summer to update the voter rolls, has removed more than 130 million names. One of the central demands of the protesters is the resignation of the country’s electoral chief, Gyanesh Kumar. For more than a week, anger over the voter roll revision has fueled protests by a range of Indian organizations and opposition politicians. The three cockroach leaders were arrested in a dramatic show of force on Saturday morning, when police officers boarded the plane on which they had flown to the capital. The men shared video of their encounter with police on social media. They were detained under a law that allows police to preventively arrest, without a warrant, those they believe would commit a crime, to maintain public order. A Delhi magistrate ordered his release 24 hours later. Delhi Police said on social media on Sunday, after the men’s release, that “all due legal procedures were followed.” demonstrations to come. The Cucaracha party emerged this summer out of Generation Z’s anger over a dysfunctional system for college entrance exams in India. (The group’s name is a tongue-in-cheek response to a comment India’s top judge made last May, calling young Indians “cockroaches.”) Protests led by the Cockroach Party led to the rare dismissal of a government minister in July, after which the group worked to draw attention to poor conditions in rural India schools. In September, he took advantage of the review of the voter registry.
