Fourteen individuals — among them Saurav Das of the Cockroach Janata Party and Ashutosh Ranka — were taken into custody by Delhi Police at Jantar Mantar and transported to Jaffarpur Kalan police station, according to the group's legal representative. The detentions followed Jantar Mantar losing its status as a permitted venue for public demonstrations.
At a press conference, Cockroach Janata Party activist Mehr Parsicha argued that public spaces are a shared civic resource that no government authority has the right to use as a tool for suppressing dissent. A statement attributed to demonstrators described the country as belonging to its people collectively rather than to any single individual.
Parsicha said the location belonged to everyone, and that what had unfolded that day demonstrated no authority held the power to remove people's rights. She raised concerns about the scale of security arrangements across Central Delhi, questioning why such a large contingent of paramilitary and police personnel had been deployed against gatherings she described as peaceful, and said that Jantar Mantar and the surrounding area had effectively been placed under a security lockdown for an extended period.
She stated that personnel drawn from border postings across the country had been repositioned at the location to contain a planned public gathering, and asked why approximately 50,000 military personnel had been deployed to maintain a perimeter around a gathering she described as non-threatening.
In her address, Parsicha described how authorities were working to push demonstration activity away from Jantar Mantar, placing organised public dissent at a remove from the corridors of power. She added that the proposal had been to push gatherings to an even more distant location.
Parsicha noted that the organisation had visited the local police station to follow the required procedure after learning that a 10-day advance notice was needed, and that members had asked officers to assign any date they found workable — whether that fell one day out, five days, six, ten, or eleven. She said the opening remark from authorities had suggested moving the gathering to Punjab or to a remote Himalayan summit if the current location posed a problem.
She alleged that when her group asked police to set a date for their demonstration at Jantar Mantar, no officer at either the ACP or SHO level was reachable for a response, and that a press release announcing the de-notification of Jantar Mantar was issued within roughly half an hour of their departure.
Parsicha attributed the move directly to the top leadership of the Union government, contending that Delhi Police was operating on instructions passed down through the Ministry of Home Affairs. She identified Narendra Modi and Amit Shah — whom opponents refer to as "Tanashah" — as the individuals behind these decisions.
Her position was that the process lacked a legitimate basis — that removing an established communal gathering space from the public, without prior notice or their agreement, fell outside what the authorities had any right to do.