Shiv Sena (UBT) leader Aaditya Thackeray on Saturday backed Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) founder Abhijeet Dipke’s call for a nationwide protest if Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar did not resign by Saturday. The call came amid a row over the electoral process and the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls following a media report.
On Friday, Dipke announced that he would launch a nationwide protest from Mumbai if Kumar did not resign by Saturday and expand it to cities across India on October 2.
“This Gandhi Jayanti, let’s pledge to save democracy,” he wrote. The Shiv Sena (UBT) leader backed Dipke’s demand for Kumar’s resignation and said Mumbai “will step out” in large numbers on October 2 against “vote chori”. Earlier on Thursday, Thackeray said the “timeline for the CEC to go has been set”. He wrote on X, “Change is coming, each one responsible for the Lost Decade of our country, must be brought to justice.”
His remarks came after a report by The Indian Express said that Election Commissioners Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi had formally raised objections at least 14 times over 10 months to decisions and orders they allegedly said were taken without their knowledge.
“Democracy means that people choose their government. This is not democracy, this is autocracy. Under Gyanesh Kumar, we are seeing an electoral system in which the Election Commission is deciding who remains on the voter rolls and who does not.
When millions of names can disappear from draft rolls, the burden is on the Commission to establish that every exclusion is lawful, transparent and subject to meaningful review,” said Dipke.
