A crowd of several dozen people assembled in Vancouver to express support for demonstrators in India, where authorities had detained thousands during the unrest. A Mumbai resident named Pablo Khan said his brother and sister were taken into custody by authorities in New Delhi on Saturday during a demonstration against what he described as manipulation of the country's electoral process.
The day after, Khan was among roughly 50 people who gathered in downtown Vancouver to express solidarity with protesters in India and to assert their right to peaceful assembly, following reports of mass detentions in New Delhi. He described how those detained had been taken from the roadside mid-conversation with journalists and loaded onto a bus.
Khan noted that those detained were subsequently released, though officers followed them on the journey back to their residences. The Vancouver rally came a day after Delhi Police took approximately 2,400 people into custody during Saturday's events, a figure relayed by a force spokesperson in comments to a news outlet. The bulk of those held were released before the night was out.
On Sunday, scores more people taking part in the ongoing New Delhi demonstrations were taken into custody, according to available reports. Calls for chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to step down have gathered pace across India, with protesters citing a nationwide review of voter rolls that removed approximately 130 million entries from the electoral register.
Speaking at the Vancouver gathering on Sunday, Khan expressed backing for democratic values while describing conditions in the Indian capital where, he said, police had been deployed in large numbers to remove people from public areas and place them in detention facilities. Event organisers in Vancouver largely supported that account, with their own reports pointing to suspended transit services and internet outages across parts of the city as the protest proceeded in New Delhi.
Zahara Czar, a co-organiser of the Vancouver rally held that Sunday, told attendees that global attention was fixed on the situation and called on Canada to take a position against the conduct of India's government, adding that participants at protests had faced physical harassment, including having their hair grabbed.
The electoral oversight body disputed allegations of voter roll manipulation, attributing the deletions to routine administrative processes — namely, removing registrations belonging to people who had relocated, died, or could no longer be contacted — with the explanation drawn from a broadcast news outlet's reporting on the issue. According to the commission, the voter roll cleanup targets registrations deemed ineligible, with a pathway available for any eligible voter mistakenly dropped to re-enrol.
Rival parties have contended that voter rolls were trimmed in ways that favoured the BJP during state-level contests, a charge that both the electoral body and the party have pushed back against.
The UN human rights office urged India's government to uphold the right to peaceful assembly and called for the prompt release of anyone held without lawful basis. A spokesperson for the body, Thameen Al-Kheetan, noted that any curbs placed on peaceful protest are required to satisfy strict standards of both necessity and proportionality.
Czar told reporters that walking through New Delhi at this point would leave her feeling uncomfortable, pointing to the prospect of harassment as a factor, and noted that unease over the direction of democracy was something she and those around her had in common.
