Rival Rallies Face Off in London's Parliament Square as Anti-CEC Protests Reach the Diaspora

The row over India's Election Commission spilled onto the streets of London on Saturday, as hundreds of protesters gathered beneath Mahatma Gandhi's statue in Parliament Square to demand the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, while a smaller group of government supporters staged a counter-rally a few metres away.

Metropolitan Police officers kept the two sides apart as each tried to drown out the other. The main "Stop Vote Chori" gathering, organised by the Indian Overseas Congress youth wing with backing from groups including Save Democracy, the Students' Federation of India (SFI) UK and the South Asia Solidarity Group, opened with a reading of the Constitution's preamble. Across the statue, supporters mobilised by India Diaspora UK responded with chants of "Modi, Modi".

Rathee sets out a specific demand

YouTuber and activist Dhruv Rathee, who was among those detained by Delhi Police ahead of an anti-CEC protest last week, was the keynote speaker. Speaking in Hindi, he told the crowd he was addressing fellow Indians and NRIs rather than inviting foreign involvement, and framed the protests as having a clear end point: they would stop, he said, once the CEC is replaced by someone chosen with the agreement of both the government and the Leader of the Opposition.

That is a narrower and more concrete ask than the broad "vote chori" slogan suggests. It points at the 2023 law that gave the government a majority on the panel selecting election commissioners, rather than at the revision exercise alone.

India Diaspora UK founder Hirdesh Gupta, for his part, said the diaspora stood firmly behind Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government's development agenda.

A week of escalating diaspora protests

Saturday's rally was the largest of several London events since an "emergency protest" on Tuesday called in solidarity with the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), whose demands include Kumar's removal and the scrapping of the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. A smaller protest and counter-protest took place outside the High Commission of India on Friday.

The Election Commission has defended the SIR as routine housekeeping to strip out deceased, duplicate and shifted voters, and ineligible entries.

Dipke out on bail in Delhi

Back home, CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke, who was arrested on Saturday morning for allegedly breaching a peace bond he had signed earlier this month, was granted bail by a Special Executive Magistrate. Police said he would be released after signing a fresh bond requiring him to keep the peace for a year. His party's legal head, Ratna Singh, called the arrest unlawful, arguing that urging people to unfurl the national flag could not amount to an offence. (See our earlier coverage of the first round of Delhi detentions.)

What to watch

The protests now have a domestic calendar too: Delhi Police have cleared the Congress to hold a rally at Ramlila Maidan on November 1. With the movement drawing crowds abroad and counter-mobilisation by pro-government diaspora groups, the dispute over how India picks its election commissioners is turning into a test of the government's image overseas as much as at home.

This is an original summary based on public reporting. See our editorial policy for how we source, write, and correct our stories.