Bengaluru Police Detain AISA Students At Freedom Park Over Electoral Roll Revision Protest

Bengaluru city police detained at least 50 All India Students’ Association students at Freedom Park on Saturday while they were protesting the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls and demanding Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation. The students said the detentions took place before they could begin a planned march to the Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer’s office.

The students said they were assembled at Freedom Park, the designated protest site, and were protesting peacefully when the police moved in. The Hindu reported that the protesters were stopped inside the park premises itself.

The protest focused on the SIR exercise and on the removal of names from the electoral rolls. The students wanted the 1.07 crore names listed as absent, shifted or dead in the draft to be restored and any such deletions scrapped. They said the police action mattered because it came before the march could get underway.

March Plans and Detention

The protesters had planned to march from Freedom Park to the Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer’s office, which is a few hundred metres away. They wanted to submit their demands there, including Kumar’s resignation and the scrapping of deletions from the rolls.

The students said the police intervened before any march began. They said they were still within Freedom Park when they were detained.

The protesters said, “barricades had been put up at both ends of the protest site, and they had not crossed the barricades or moved towards the Karnataka Chief Electoral Officer’s office when the police suddenly detained them and took them away in buses.”

Other AISA students said the police took protesters away in different buses. They said they were trying to contact those detained to find out where they had been taken.

Police Deployment Response

AISA members said a large police force had been deployed. They said hundreds of personnel were on duty and roads on both sides had been barricaded to keep the protesters from reaching the Karnataka CEO’s office.

The students said they did not know whether everyone had been taken to the same police station or split across several locations. That remained unclear after the detentions, they said.

“Some protesters were at a police station, while others were trying to establish contact with those detained. We will stage another agitation at the police station itself if the detained students are not released,” AISA members said.

Left Groups Condemnation

Left groups condemned the action. AISA Karnataka and other Left student organisations said the police were suppressing the democratic right to protest.

AISA also criticised the Congress-led Karnataka government’s handling of the protest. The organisation asked how Congress was any different from the BJP in its approach to dissent.

The student group also cited the Congress party’s national stance on SIR, saying it too had sought the revision’s scrapping, and asked why the right to protest was upheld when a party was in opposition but curtailed when it was in power.