Cockroach Janta Party gives Gyanesh Kumar 48 hours to resign, threatens nationwide protest

Cockroach Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke on Thursday threatened to launch a nationwide agitation if Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar failed to resign within 48 hours. Dipke claimed that Gyanesh Kumar is the “biggest anti-national in the country”. He said that the government was deciding who gets to vote and who does not since Gyanesh Kumar took over as the Chief Election Commissioner. This comes as a response to the Indian Express investigation, which alleged an internal rift within the top leadership over several key decisions of the apex polling authority of India.

"If within 48 hours Gyanesh Kumar doesn't resign, the Cockroach Janata Party will start a nationwide agitation. We won't step back till the time Gyanesh Kumar resigns," said CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke in a press conference on Thursday.

The Cockroach Janta Party put forward three demands-

• Resignation of Gyanesh Kumar and initiating criminal proceedings against him.
• Rolling back of the pre-SIR (January 2025) voter list.
• Repealing the 2023 law on appointment of the Election Commissioner

“In total, more than 13 crore votes have been deleted. This is not a small number. In the 2024 Lok Sabha election, the margin between the opposition and the ruling party (NDA) was just 2%,” said CJP founder Abhijeet Dipke. He argued that deleting 13 crore voters is roughly equivalent to the deletion of 13-14% of the total votes.

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“The BJP failed to secure a majority in the 2024 election. The panic button was pressed when they fell short of that majority... They realised then that the mood of the country was shifting and that regional forces were emerging very strongly, be it Uddhav Thackeray in Maharashtra, the NCP, Stalin, Pinarayi Vijayan, Arvind Kejriwal, or Mamata Banerjee. These chief ministers were targeted and defeated one by one.”

“In West Bengal, 50,000 votes were deleted from Mamata Banerjee’s constituency, and she lost by a margin of around 15,000 votes. In MK Stalin’s constituency, 100,000 votes were deleted, and he lost by about 45,000 votes. In Delhi, 40,000 votes were deleted from Arvind Kejriwal’s constituency, and he lost by a margin of 4000-5000 votes," said Dipke.

The fallout is a direct reaction to the Indian Express investigative report, which quoted internal communication within the Election Commission to suggest that two election commissioners have repeatedly objected to several key decisions, including developing new modules and portals for centralising the electoral database without their prior approval, alteration of Form 6 for new voter registration without any formal government notification and disenfranchisement of voters in Special Intensive Revision. They in fact tried to raise their concerns and wrote separately to Cabinet Secretary TV Somanathan. The Election Commission tried to shrug off the concerns by saying that differing opinions are normal in any institution, but it did not issue a specific response to the concerns raised in the report.