Thousands of youths gathered and waved the tricolour at New Delhi’s Connaught Place for the ‘Lehra Do Tiranga’ flag-hoisting event called by Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) on Friday, October 16, but the rally could not be held as planned because Delhi Police detained CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke and All India Students’ Association (AISA) national president Neha Bora were before they could reach the rally venue.
As nearly 150 protesters were detained by police by the evening, Opposition leaders, expressed their full support for Dipke and Bora, saying that waving a Tiranga was no crime. These leaders included former West Bengal CM Mamata Banerjee, former Tamil Nadu CM MK Stalin and AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal.
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Dipke was detained while leaving the residence of NCP-SP spokesperson Anish Gawande in Jhandewalan area of Delhi ahead of CJP’s proposed march at Connaught Place and Central Park. Neha Bora was detained near Mandi House when she was heading to the protest site. More than 25,000 police and paramilitary personnel were deployed in and around Connaught Place for the proposed protest.
This was the second detention for Dipke in a span of a week. He was earlier detained on October 10 directly from inside an aircraft after it landed at Indira Gandhi International Airport (IGIA) in New Delhi as he travelled from Mumbai for a massive protest organised at Jantar Mantar on his call. That protest prompted government to denotify Jantar Mantar as a protest site on October 12 and announce three new designated protest venues in the national capital.
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Both CJP and AISA said Dipke and Bora’s whereabouts were not being made public by Delhi Police and that they were being denied access to lawyers and associates. CJP alleged Dipke had been taken to an undisclosed location while AISA said Bora was first held alone at Anti-Narcotics Task Force office in Mangolpuri before being shifted to an undisclosed location.
Dipke’s top CJP aides Saurabh Das and Ashutosh Ranka were placed under preventive arrest and then sent to judicial custody at Tihar Jail for five days on October 14 for allegedly trespassing, waving the Tricolour, and holding a protest at Jantar Mantar despite it having been de-notified by Delhi Police as a designated protest venue.
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On Friday, Mamata Banerjee praised the three CJP leaders. “Abhijeet, Ashutosh (Ranka), Saurav (Das), you represent the courage, conscience and aspirations of India’s youth… Your Didi stands firmly with you,” she wrote in a post on X.
Condemning the detention of Dipke and Bora, Banerjee wrote: “WHAT IS DELHI POLICE UP TO?” The Trinamool Congress founder then added, “Abhijeet Dipke has been detained for holding the Indian National Flag. Let that sink in. In Independent India, our youth are being detained for peacefully asserting their democratic rights”. She also said the detention of youth leaders was “nothing short of an undeclared Emergency”.
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AAP chief Arvind Kejriwal described the central government and police’s action as “sheer dictatorship”. “Is waving the Tiranga [‘tricolour’/national flag] a crime? Abhijeet’s arrest shows how scared Modi ji is of them,” the AAP chief wrote in an X post. “If we don’t wave the Tiranga in our own country, will we wave it in Pakistan? Those who have a problem with the Indian Tiranga should go to Pakistan,” Kejriwal wrote on X.
