In 2025, the Election Commission of India launched a programme it called a "Special Intensive Revision" (SIR) of voter rolls, a process that placed the registrations of more than 130 million people under review for potential removal. Critics argued that the ruling handed down by the Election Commission fell unevenly on communities of Muslim faith and ethnic minority backgrounds.
A prior phase of the SIR process, during which more than nine million names were removed from voter rolls, formed part of the backdrop to the BJP's win in West Bengal's 2026 state assembly election. Voting results displaced Trinamool Congress from power, with the BJP forming a state government for the first time in that region's political record. By October 2026, the BJP had extended its hold across 22 of India's 31 states and union territories.
India's federal government has been under BJP control since 2014, a party that sits at the centre of the Hindutva — or Hindu nationalist — political tradition. Ties to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh and the Vishva Hindu Parishad — the latter serving as its overseas fundraising arm — formed the organisational foundation through which it built political influence.
Rallies drawing participants from a range of political organisations — including the youth-based Cockroach Janta Party and the Communist Party of India (Marxist) — gathered momentum around calls for the reinstatement of cancelled voter registrations. Across the country, gatherings drawing hundreds of thousands of people turned out over democratic rights, even as authorities took more than 7,000 people into custody — among them CPI(M) General Secretary M.A. Baby, together with a substantial portion of the party's top national figures, following arrests carried out on 10 October.
Opposition parties on the left side of India's political spectrum put forward two demands: the complete reinstatement of electoral franchise and the removal of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar from his post.
Police took into custody large numbers of affiliates from CJP, CPI(M), and affiliated political organisations over their involvement in the demonstrations. Around Jantar Mantar, a police presence stretching across a two-mile perimeter brought together upwards of 40,000 officers, making it one of the larger law-enforcement concentrations seen in the area. CPI(M) politician John Brittas was taken to hospital following an altercation involving police personnel.
Figures from the CJP remain in detention, even as a number of journalists and political figures — the entire national leadership of CPI(M) among them — were released at some point after their arrest. Those taking part in the demonstrations recorded what they described as a pattern of sexual harassment carried out by officers, apparently intended to deter women from attending the rallies.
The quoted call to channel widespread public dissatisfaction into electoral contests preceded a broader account of how the BJP, drawing on its authority over state administrations, moved to restrict public transport access, limit protest activity, and bar demonstrations from the national capital. Across New Delhi, an outright prohibition on public gatherings had not been put in place by any administration since the period known as "The Emergency" — the suspension of ordinary governance that Indira Gandhi enforced in 1975.
Rooted in youth and student activism, the Cockroach Janta Party positioned itself as a distinct political player by 2026, coordinating with the Student Federation of India — the student wing of the CPI(M) — alongside other left-leaning organisations to contest the BJP's stances on economic and education policy. The party drew its name from remarks attributed to Chief Justice Surya Kant — in which he reportedly described jobless and underemployed youth as "cockroaches" — and mobilised that same demographic to take to the streets.
Amid mounting disputes over the national standardised testing and university entrance examination framework, the Chief Justice of Pakistan urged Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to vacate his post and put forward proposals for overhauling the system's governance structures.
Agrarian legislation introduced in 2021 was ultimately withdrawn after the All-India Kisan Sabha — the peasant wing affiliated with CPI(M) — coordinated a nationwide mobilisation in which large numbers of rural cultivators and smallholders gathered in Haryana and across other states, occupying public grounds in a sustained push for repeal. Karat — a Politburo member of the CPI(M) and a longstanding figure within the All-India Democratic Women's Federation — attributed part of the protests' political resonance to their proximity to the national capital, drawing a comparison with the Kisan, or Farmer's Movement, demonstrations that took place across states adjoining New Delhi from 2021 through 2022, actions she described as having been organised with the involvement of herself and her colleagues and as having extended across a wide stretch of the region.
Positioning the defeat of those reforms as a pivot point in a broader struggle over land and resources taken by the state, she also noted that dozens of opposition parties had coalesced ahead of the 2024 federal election into a joint electoral front called the Indian National Development Inclusive Alliance, or INDIA bloc. The result fell short of removing Modi and the BJP from office, yet it stripped the party of an outright parliamentary majority — an outcome not seen since 2009 — leaving the BJP reliant on coalition partners to sustain its hold on government.
At a joint press briefing held that year, Modi and Trump appeared together, with the Indian leader voicing backing for a two-way partnership between their administrations. A statement from the Communist Party USA aligned with positions held by the CPI(M), expressing opposition to what it described as coordination between the Trump and Modi administrations and asserting that joint policy directions across both countries had deepened the scope of measures the party characterised as anti-democratic; separately, communist parties spanning Pakistan, Bangladesh, Greece, Turkey, Britain, and other nations put forward messages of solidarity with the protests.
Karat noted that the movement met both goals it had publicly set out and drew support from across the country, with the CPI(M) and allied left parties standing alongside CJP activists whose organisational work had helped channel large numbers of previously unaffiliated young people into structured participation. On the wider political landscape, Karat contended that the wave of protests marked a turning point for India while also exposing what he described as a widening gap between election results and the everyday social and economic concerns of ordinary citizens, pointing to practices such as constituency manipulation, patronage networks, and voter suppression as mechanisms through which right-wing forces had learned to secure ballot-box victories.
By-election results at both state assembly and local tiers continued to favour the party, though Karat noted those outcomes may not fully capture the breadth of grassroots difficulties playing out on the ground. Unions across the political spectrum — those operating under communist leadership alongside independent ones — threw their weight behind the movement's platform, distributing its core demands to memberships numbering in the millions.
