Heavy police crackdown and security deployment in the national capital in light of the Cockroach Janata Party’s (CJP) scheduled protest at Jantar Mantar has drawn flak from Congress leader Shashi Tharoor, who slammed the Centre for “completely shackling freedom of movement”.
“Barricades will do nothing to restore faith in the Election Commission, and the sooner it answers the public’s questions, the sooner calm will be restored. On the other hand, AISA’s National President, Neha Bora, has called for crowds to gather at Dilli Haat instead of Jantar Mantar due to police curtailments in and around Jantar Mantar.
Tharoor, stating that he arrived in the national capital sometime after 2am on Satiurday, slammed the Central government for “a war-like deployment of 22,000 police and paramilitary across the city, 250 trains cancelled, 45 metro stations closed, and reports of young people being detained from their own homes and the streets” with the use of “checkpoints every few hundred metres, concrete barriers and spike strips laid across our roads”. Directly referring to allegations of massive voter disenfranchisement as part of the Election Commission’s SIR exercise, Tharoor said that a government confident in the fairness of its elections would welcome questions about them, whereas one that turns its capital into a fortress to avoid them only “deepens the very suspicions it seeks to suppress”. “The government should provide answers, not lathis; expression, not repression,” he said.
The strength of a democracy is measured by how it treats those who question its working, and by that measure, what we have seen today is utterly shameful and unconscionable,” the Congress MP added.
