Indian Opposition Leader Detained as Protests Escalate

Police in India's capital, New Delhi, detained opposition leader Rahul Gandhi during a Tuesday protest about voter lists. Opposition groups want the chief election official to resign after more than 130,000,000 names were removed from electoral rolls. Bloomberg Shruti Srivastava joins us from New Delhi with the details. And, Shruti, it was pretty dramatic. We're talking about riot police here. Yeah. Absolutely. It was a pretty dramatic scenes yesterday in central part of New Delhi where we saw, hundreds of, leaders from opposition march towards the election commission of India seeking of the chief election official, and they have been demanding his resignation for cup... For the last few weeks. Ever since there were meet... There was a media report which alleged that the chief election commission, he took decisions unilaterally on the revision of voters list. Now as you said, one thirty million names have been removed from this controversial revision of voter list, an exercise which has been going on since the last year. Opposition leaders have been alleging that this exercise has benefited prime minister Narendra Modi's ruling party unfairly. In recently, in the last in the last few months ago, Modi's BGP won a key state West of West Bengal in a surprise landslide victory. And while it is not clear how much of this controversial, voters role revision has helped in that, but opposition are saying that, you know, with key state elections coming over next year, this exercise should be scrapped immediately. So we saw heavy deployment of riot police. In fact, in some places, we saw police personals outnumber the protesters itself. Shruti, you gotta wonder how this will impact the Modi government because we saw huge protests just two months ago from students. Absolutely. This present... This presents yet another challenge to the Modi government, especially, you know, in July, we saw massive students protest over a leak of examination paper, which led to resignation of the education minister in the federal government. So this is yet another challenge which is, in... Which is facing the Modi government, and it has the potential to snowball yet, you know, into a bigger controversy and gives a major flash point to the opposition parties ahead of key elections next year. We are going to see some seven, eight key elections, especially in this northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which is one of the biggest state which sends the maximum number of parliamentarians. So, it has the potential to, you know, be... Become a bigger headache for the Modi government going forward. Yeah. So following on that, given those state elections, you think the BJP party might be impacted, or is it too early to tell? Well, I would say it's too early to tell, but, you know, the the protests have been gathering steam. The Cockroach Janata party, which successfully led the students protest in July, they have said that they would be protesting, you know, on October 10. On the same issue, they have been demanding the resignation of the chief election official, Gyanesh Kumar, and they say that they will continue protesting till he renders his resignation. So we'll have to see how the entire protest momentum... How it shapes up going forward, but definitely it presents a big challenge to the government.