Government Shuts Jantar Mantar While Election Commission Guards Its Files

Protest ground erased, voters removed in millions, files unseen. The Supreme Court now holds the one chance for transparency.

On the evening of 12 October, the Delhi Police made public an order that most people in the capital did not know was coming. It said that Jantar Mantar, the small stretch of road about a kilometre from Parliament where Indians have gone to be heard for more than three decades, was no longer a designated protest site. Police Commissioner Anurag Kumar had signed the standing order a day earlier, on 11 October. In its place the police named three grounds: Ramlila Maidan, three kilometres away; CBD Ground in Shahdara, twelve kilometres away; and Burari Ground, twenty-three kilometres away.

The timing tells its own story. The order came on the same day opposition leaders marched towards the Supreme Court to file a joint petition against the Election Commission. It came two days after thousands of protesters were detained in Delhi. It came one day before police detained leaders of the Cockroach Janta Party near the same barricades. And it came less than a week before the Supreme Court sat to hear 46 petitions on the voter-roll revision and the policing of the protests.

When a government removes the place where people gather to question it, at the very moment the questions are loudest, it owes the public a clear reason. And when a constitutional body that runs elections is asked to open its files and it does not, it owes the public a clear reason too. This article sets out what is known, what is claimed, what the numbers show, and what each institution must now answer for.

The order, and what it replaces

The standing order says the Ministry of Home Affairs formed a committee to look at alternative venues for citizens to protest. Based on its recommendations, Jantar Mantar was removed from the list. The Delhi Police have not, in the order made public, explained what the committee found wrong with the site, who sat on it, or how long it deliberated.

This is a significant change, so it helps to know the history.

Protests in central Delhi were once held on the lawns of the Boat Club near India Gate. In October 1988, farmer leader Mahendra Singh Tikait gathered a huge crowd there. Because the crowds disrupted traffic, police moved demonstrations away. Jantar Mantar became the main site. In July 2018, in the case of Mazdoor Kisan Shakti Sangathan versus Union of India, the Supreme Court recorded this history. It noted that police had designated Jantar Mantar for gatherings of up to 5,000 people, while larger demonstrations were to be held at Ramlila Maidan.

Since then, Jantar Mantar has been the stage for some of India's best-known movements. The India Against Corruption campaign began there in April 2011, with leaders from across the political spectrum sharing the platform. Wrestlers protested there in 2023. In 2024, chief ministers of southern states sat on a dharna there over fair devolution of central taxes. And in July this year, protests led by the Cockroach Janta Party over the NEET paper leak forced Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign.

That last fact matters. In the same year that the site produced a ministerial resignation, it was closed.

A government that moves the protest ground after a protest topples a minister has not solved a problem. It has moved the problem out of sight.

The distance is the point

Defenders of the order point to practical issues. The New Delhi Traders Association, which speaks for shopkeepers in Connaught Place, welcomed the decision, saying it would reduce inconvenience to the public and to business. That concern is real. Shops near Jantar Mantar lose customers when roads are blocked, and residents have complained about noise and traffic for years.

But the distances show something else. A protest at Jantar Mantar is heard by Parliament, by ministers' offices and by the national press that works in the centre of the city. A protest at Burari Ground, twenty-three kilometres away in North Delhi, is heard by almost no one. History offers a warning here. When farmers led by Tikait were given the Burari ground in the mid-1990s, their protest went largely unnoticed. In 2021, the leaders of the farm-law agitation were offered the same ground. They remembered that story and refused. They camped at the borders of Delhi instead, at Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur, and went on to win.

The CPI(ML) Liberation party put it sharply: from Boat Club to India Gate, from the Red Fort to Jantar Mantar, and now to the remote corners of Delhi, protests have been pushed further and further from Parliament, the very centre of people's representation. Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav called the move the biggest defeat of the BJP government. Congress's Jairam Ramesh said democracy no longer matters to the Prime Minister and Home Minister. The Cockroach Janta Party said it would not accept what it called an arbitrary decision.

Not every one of these statements is fair. Politicians use sharp language, and the BJP's Shivraj Singh Chouhan called the opposition march to the Supreme Court "drama" and described the protesters as a group of hooligans creating anarchy. But even setting politics aside, a simple point remains. If the aim was only to protect traffic and trade, the government could have created an additional site and left the existing one open. It chose to close the one that matters most.

What led to this week

To understand why the protests are happening at all, one has to understand the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, of the electoral rolls.

The Election Commission launched the first intensive revision in Bihar in June 2025. The early rules demanded documents from many voters. Aadhaar and the voter identity card were left off the list of accepted proof. The Supreme Court intervened, and Aadhaar was eventually accepted as an additional document. By September 2025, Bihar's final roll carried about 74.2 million voters, down from 78.9 million before the exercise, a net fall of about 4.7 million, even after more than two million additions.

The exercise then spread across the country. By this month, according to reported figures, revisions had removed more than 130 million registrations nationwide. The reported breakdown includes about 28 million deceased voters, 63 million recorded as having moved, and 30 million who could not be traced. Those three groups alone add up to about 121 million, which leaves roughly a further 9 million or more removed for other reasons.

These numbers are huge. For comparison, India's total electorate in 2024 was a little under one billion. About 130 million removals is more than the entire population of many large countries.

The figure also answers a question that was open for days. Opposition leaders, including leaders of Congress, had said that about 13 crore names had been deleted. We had not been able to confirm it. The reported count supports it. That does not prove anyone acted wrongly. India's rolls have long carried dead voters and duplicates, and a clean list is something every honest citizen wants. But it settles the scale. This is the largest change to the voter list in India's history.

The categories deserve more scrutiny than they have had

The labels used in the reported breakdown are "deceased", "relocated" and "untraceable". They look neat. But each one hides a hard judgment, made by a field officer at a door.

A voter marked as "relocated" may have moved for work within the same state and still be eligible at the old address. India has millions of migrant workers who live in one city and vote in their village. A voter marked "untraceable" may simply not have been home when an officer visited. A woman who moved after marriage may be listed twice or not at all.

The reported figures include 63 million people marked as having moved and 30 million as untraceable. That is 93 million people whose removal rests on an officer's finding that they were not where they were expected to be. The question of how reliably those judgments were made is the central question of the whole controversy. It cannot be answered by anyone outside the Commission, because the Commission holds the data.

Ninety-three million names were removed because someone said the person was not there. The public has a right to ask how anyone checked.

The Commission's own members objected

The controversy deepened in September, when it was reported that the two other Election Commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected to decisions within the Commission at least 14 times in ten months. The reported objections concerned additions and deletions of voters and decisions allegedly taken without proper authorisation.

That detail shifts the debate. For a year, the argument was between the opposition and the Commission, and the Commission could say the opposition was simply losing and looking for someone to blame. The report suggests that people inside the Commission had doubts about how decisions were made.

The petition now before the Supreme Court builds on this. It claims that Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar exercised the collective powers of the Commission on his own during the revision. It asks the Court to call for the files, agendas, meeting minutes, official notings and objections recorded by the Election Commissioners. It also asks for the access logs of ECINET and ERONET, the Commission's internal digital systems, and for the complete file on the 24 June 2025 decision to launch the SIR. It seeks an independent committee led by a retired Supreme Court judge. It asks the Court to examine whether decisions followed Article 324 of the Constitution and Section 18 of the 2023 law on the appointment and service conditions of election commissioners.

It is worth noting what the petition does not do. It does not ask the Court to undo its earlier ruling. On 27 May 2026, a bench headed by Chief Justice Surya Kant and Justice Joymalya Bagchi upheld the legality of the SIR. The Court held that the Commission has the power to conduct such revisions under Article 324 and the Representation of the People Act. It said Aadhaar is not conclusive proof of citizenship. It said the Commission's list of 11 documents is indicative, not exhaustive, and it said the Commission's role is limited to deciding who is eligible to be on the roll, not who is a citizen. And it said that people excluded must have routes and methods to challenge the decision.

The Court, in other words, decided the principle. The opposition's petition is about the practice: how the powers were used, by whom, with whose agreement, and on what records.

The Supreme Court's day

On 15 October, the same bench heard the petitions. It issued notice to the Election Commission, to Mr Kumar, and to the two other commissioners on the petition filed by Rahul Gandhi and other INDIA bloc leaders. It tagged the petition alongside other SIR challenges, including one by AIMIM leader Asaduddin Owaisi. The Court said it would ask one petitioner about his conduct on the next date, which was widely read as a reference to the opposition's march to the Court, and it made remarks on that march after lawyers raised it. The hearing was adjourned until the Union government, Delhi Police and the Election Commission file their replies.

The same day, the Court took up pleas about the policing of the 10 October protest. These petitions allege the detention of lawyers, house arrest of opposition leaders, restrictions on movement, disruption of metro and railway services, road blockades, and suspension of internet services. Contempt petitions have been filed against the Union Home Secretary, police officials and the Metro chairperson. The Court issued notice on a separate plea from four advocates asking for rules on processions near court premises. It directed police not to take coercive action against a woman journalist whose complaint of molestation is pending.

The Delhi Police Commissioner told the Court that detained protesters were served fresh, hot meals. The police also defended refusing permission to the Cockroach Janta Party for its protest, citing what they called lessons from the July agitation. The Court has not yet decided any of these questions. It is waiting for the counter-affidavits.

A fair reading of this day has two sides. The Court's willingness to hear all 46 petitions and issue notice to the Commission is a sign that the system can still be questioned in a courtroom. But the Court also spent time on the opposition's march. And nothing the Court has done yet forces the Commission to open a single page.

The state's response: restrictions as a first instinct

Put the events together and a pattern appears. Section 163 orders around Jantar Mantar. Opposition MPs stopped from marching for two days. More than 700 people detained on 2 October, and, according to Indian media reports, thousands detained on 10 October. Cases registered against Rahul Gandhi and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra. Six metro stations closed on 12 October ahead of the opposition march. Reports of mobile internet not working near Raj Ghat. Delhi Police getting 300 social media posts taken down for allegedly spreading rumours. The Chief Justice declining a request from the leaders of the opposition for a meeting, saying the matter was before the Court.

Some of these steps may be defended on their own. Police do have a duty to prevent violence, and on one day Delhi Police alleged that some of their personnel were injured in clashes. If that is true, those responsible should answer for it. The CJI is right that a sitting judge cannot meet one side on a pending case.

But taken together, the steps send a message: that the first response to a mass demand for transparency is control. The Supreme Court itself said in the Anuradha Bhasin judgment of 2020 that orders restricting gatherings must be reasoned, proportionate and limited in time. Removing a site permanently, through a standing order made public one day after it was signed, is hard to square with that principle.

What the opposition must also answer

A critique that only looks one way would be weak. The opposition has its own tasks.

Rahul Gandhi's call for the Chief Election Commissioner to "turn approver", and his claim that 200 government officers are in touch with the opposition, are statements that need evidence. If he has information from inside the machinery, it should go to the Court, with documents, not into speeches. The Supreme Court has rightly noticed the manner in which the march on the Court was carried out.

The charge of "vote chori", or vote theft, needs to be kept apart from the charge about the revision. Rahul Gandhi's August 2025 presentation on Mahadevapura in Karnataka claimed 100,250 invalid entries in a single assembly segment, including 11,965 duplicates and 40,009 with invalid addresses. The Election Commission rejected it as misleading and asked him to sign a declaration under oath. An examination of those addresses found that some of the addresses he flagged were in areas with many migrant workers, which could explain unusual numbers of voters at one address. His presentation raised questions that deserved examination. It did not prove that votes were stolen.

The two questions are separate. The first is whether millions of registrations were removed correctly. There is a strong case that this deserves examination. The second is whether any wrongful removals were deliberately designed to help the ruling party. That claim needs far more evidence than anyone has yet shown. An opposition that wants to be believed should keep the two apart and argue the first with data.

Opposition-ruled states also have duties. Booth-level agents of all parties could file claims and objections during the revision. If large numbers of eligible voters were removed in a state where an opposition party had agents at every booth, that party should explain what it did.

The questions the Commission must answer

Whatever one's politics, there is a simple list of questions that the Election Commission should be able to answer in a public affidavit, with numbers.

1. How many of the removed names, in each state, were removed as deceased, as relocated, as untraceable and as duplicate, and what evidence was recorded for each? 2. How many people filed claims or objections, how many were accepted, how many rejected, how many are still pending, and how long did each take? 3. How many removed names were later restored? 4. Who decided, and on what record, to launch the revision on 24 June 2025 and to change its rules over time? 5. Did the Chief Election Commissioner decide alone on any of these steps, and how many times did the other Commissioners record objections or dissent? 6. What do the ECINET and ERONET logs show about who accessed or altered records, and when? 7. Why was Form 6, the form for new voters, changed, and does it conform to the 1960 Registration of Electors Rules, as the petition asks?

These are not hostile questions. They are the questions any auditor would ask, and the Commission has every reason to want them answered, if its work was sound.

The questions the government must answer

The government, too, has questions to answer. They concern the closure of the protest ground and the handling of the protests.

1. What did the Home Ministry's committee find, who was on it, what evidence did it consider, and will its report be published? 2. Why was an additional site not created, while keeping Jantar Mantar, which the Supreme Court recognised in 2018? 3. How many people were detained on 2 October, 10 October and 13 October, on what legal grounds, and how many were released without charge? 4. What was the basis for the metro closures, the reported internet disruptions and the removal of 300 social media posts? 5. Who ordered the restrictions on opposition MPs' movements, and under what law? 6. Will there be an independent inquiry into the allegations of excessive force and the detention of lawyers and journalists?

What a fair process would look like

None of this is complicated. A fair process would have four parts.

First, open the files. The Supreme Court should order the Commission to produce the minutes, notings and objections, and the system logs, to the Court, in a sealed form if needed, and publish an index of what exists.

Second, audit the deletions. A retired judge and statisticians should draw a random sample of removed names in each state and have independent field teams check them. The result, with a margin of error, should be published. With a sample of 10,000 names, the margin of error is about one percentage point. That is precise enough to settle the argument.

Third, protect the right to protest. Keep Jantar Mantar open, add other sites if needed, and publish the Home Ministry committee's report.

Fourth, reform the institution. India's election commissioners are chosen by a panel that gives the government a majority, and the Chief Election Commissioner is practically irremovable by Parliament in the face of a presiding officer who can decline to admit a notice, as happened in April. A body this powerful should have a selection process the opposition can trust and a rule that all commissioners have equal protection.

The bottom line

India's democracy depends on a simple bargain. Citizens accept the result of an election because they trust the list of voters and the count. That trust is not guaranteed. It is earned by showing the work.

This month, the government has removed the place where people could demand that work be shown. The Election Commission has not yet shown it. And the opposition, whatever its motives, has put on the record a body of evidence, including the reported 14 internal objections and the 130 million removals, that cannot be waved away.

The Supreme Court has now issued notice. Its next order will tell the country something important: whether the institutions that were built to check power can still do so when the power is at its highest. The government's job is to stop treating questions as threats. The Commission's job is to open its files. And the Court's job is to make sure that both of them do.