Abhijeet Dipke, head of the Cockroach Janta Party, was placed under arrest on Friday, 16 October 2026, as a visible police deployment took shape across Connaught Place ahead of the 'Lehra Do Tiranga' rally — an event organised around the public display of the national tricolour. Officers were positioned in numbers that restricted the size of gatherings at the site, and access to Central Park, which had been designated as the gathering point for the protest, was not permitted on the day.

Under the 'Lehra Do Tiranga' banner, a crowd assembled at Azad Maidan on Friday, 16 October 2026, putting forward three demands: the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar from his post, a halt to the special intensive revision of electoral rolls, and the freeing of activists held in custody in New Delhi.

By around 3 p.m. that day — a full two hours ahead of the procession that the Cockroach Janta Party and affiliated Left students' organisations had announced — gatherings of demonstrators and activists carrying national flags had begun assembling near Central Park in Connaught Place. The demonstrations marked the seventh day of ongoing protests calling for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar.

A planned march to Delhi by farmer groups operating collectively as the Samyukt Kisan Morcha (SKM) is scheduled for 23 October, with participants calling for the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar in connection with the Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls. Ashok Dhawale, who leads the All India Kisan Sabha and holds a senior position within the SKM, announced that farmers would take up coordinated demonstrations at district, taluk, and block headquarters across the country in support of the demand.

On Friday, 16 October 2026, CPI(ML) Liberation's general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya urged a stepped-up campaign against what he characterised as electoral fraud, and argued that restrictions placed on the right to demonstrate amounted to a struggle comparable, in his view, to India's original independence movement. In a post on X, Bhattacharya recounted how gatherings took shape around concerns over what participants called "vote chori" — a phrase used to allege electoral theft — before those same assemblies became the subject of a separate dispute over the right to meet and protest publicly.

Delhi Police indicated that Neha Bora, who leads the All India Students' Association, was released in the early hours of Saturday, 17 October 2026, while Abhijeet Dipke — the founder of the Cockroach Janata Party — faces a scheduled appearance before the SEM court.