Shivaji Park did not look like a silence zone on Friday evening. By the time the Cockroach Janta Party opened its Gandhi Jayanti protest, more than 10,000 people had packed the approaches to the ground in Dadar, many of them barely out of college, holding handmade posters and banners that bobbed above the crowd like a second skyline.
Mumbai Police had refused permission for the gathering, citing a 2013 Bombay High Court order that limits the park largely to sport and the absence of civic clearance. Organisers had answered that refusal with a warning of a jail bharo andolan. On the day itself the force stayed on the barricades, managed the flow, and did not break up the crowd. The protest remained largely orderly. Chants rolled from Gate No. 6 toward the roads around the park, then broke into laughter whenever a slogan landed.
The demand was blunt. CJP wants Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to resign, wants criminal proceedings opened against him, wants the Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls frozen and the January 2025 voter list restored, and wants the 2023 law on appointing election commissioners scrapped. Founder Abhijeet Dipke told the gathering that if the Commissioner did not go, the next stop would be Delhi. He framed the Mumbai start as deliberate: a state where the 2024 Lok Sabha map and the later Assembly result told very different stories, he said, was the right place to ask how names disappear from the rolls.
Beside him were co-convenor Ashutosh Ranka and other CJP voices. Actors Shabana Azmi and Naseeruddin Shah, singer Vishal Dadlani, and filmmakers including Vishal Bhardwaj were also on the stage side of the cordon. The louder presence, though, was the one that had travelled by local train with cardboard under one arm.
A first-year student from Matunga held a banner that simply read “My name is not optional.” She said she had come because her aunt’s name had dropped off the list after a house move. “Nobody in my family is political,” she said. “We just want the paper that says we can vote. If that paper can vanish, the rest is theatre.”
A design student (name withheld) from Andheri had painted a cockroach in a voting ink finger. “They called us pests once,” he said, grinning. “Fine. Pests show up in numbers. Look around.” Nearby, a group from a Bandra coaching class had stitched three bedsheets into one banner: “SIR is not a cleanup. It is a cut.” One of them, still in a college T-shirt, said the heat and the police tape had not put them off. “We were told the ground was closed. So we stood on the road. The road is also India.”
Dipke used the stage to attack defections as much as the Commission, mocking the idea that lawmakers could be traded like players in an auction, and told the young crowd that a refusal in Mumbai would only move the fight to Jantar Mantar. Ranka repeated the party’s charge of mass deletions over the past two years. From the crowd came a line that kept returning between speeches: if Delhi tried to stop them, the place they were stopped would become the venue.
The afternoon was hot and close. Water bottles passed hand to hand. A few residents on the edge of Dadar complained about the traffic. Inside the press of bodies, the mood was closer to a college festival that had borrowed a political script. Posters asked for the Commissioner’s resignation in Marathi, Hindi and English. One, held by two school-leavers, said only: “Count us.”
Rehan came all the way from Nagpur, sweating and drained. Yet every time he shouted, he smiled. “My name is cockroach and I am not a terrorist…” he said
CJP has said the Mumbai meeting is the opening of a run through other cities before a Delhi sit-in. Whether that march draws the same numbers is the next test. On Gandhi Jayanti in Dadar, the test was simpler. Permission or not, more than 10,000 people came, most of them young, and they did not leave the banners at home.
