Stone-Pelting Near Akashwani Bhawan, 1,500 Detained: Delhi's Banned CJP Protest Turns Confrontational

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 10, 2026

Delhi's lockdown held through the morning. By afternoon it stopped being a lockdown and became a confrontation. Near Akashwani Bhawan, around 25 to 30 protesters toppled the barricades put up to hold them back and began pelting stones at the security personnel on the other side, according to inshorts, which cited its reporter Bhuvnesh Ojha on the ground. Two police officers were injured, inshorts reported. As Previously reported in our account of Saturday's lockdown, the capital had been sealed for a banned protest — the Cockroach Janta Party's "Jantar Mantar 2.0," called to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over alleged voter-list manipulation. The protest never had police permission, per tbsnews.net and inshorts. What followed was one of the capital's heaviest protest policings in memory turning into exactly the kind of scene the lockdown was supposed to prevent.

02 The Barricades Come Down at Akashwani Bhawan

The clash happened where the capital's security grid meets the ground: a small crowd — inshorts put the number at 25 to 30 — pushed past the barricades near Akashwani Bhawan and started throwing stones at the security personnel holding the line. Inshorts reported the account at 2:05 AM local time Saturday, attributed to its reporter Bhuvnesh Ojha. Two police personnel were injured in the stone-pelting, per the same report.

One note of caution, because it matters: this account is single-source so far. Inshorts' reporter filed it from the scene, but at the time of publication no second outlet had independently confirmed the crowd size, the injury count, or the exact sequence at Akashwani Bhawan. Delhi Police had not publicly detailed the confrontation in the reports available. That's the nature of a fast-moving afternoon in a city where 27,000 personnel are spread across the map — information arrives in fragments, and the fragments have to be labeled as fragments.

What the fragments do agree on is the broader turn of the day. The morning belonged to the lockdown: barricades, checkpoints, shuttered stations. The afternoon belonged to the small pockets of demonstrators who found their way around it. Toppling barricades and throwing stones at the police is where a banned protest crosses from defiance into confrontation, and it changes the conversation from "how many were detained" to "what happened when the line was tested."

03 A Dragnet Widening to 1,500

The detention tally kept climbing through the day. About 1,500 people were taken into custody during Saturday's protests, inshorts reported — a number that dwarfs the roughly 500 detentions that had been tallied in the morning accounts of the lockdown. (Another note of caution: the 1,500 figure is inshorts' reporting, and it had not been corroborated by a second outlet at publication time.)

The scale of the operation around those detentions is well documented across outlets. tbsnews.net reported that roughly 27,000 police and paramilitary personnel were deployed across the capital, with entry and exit restrictions at more than 40 metro stations, traffic diversions across central Delhi, and more than 250 trains cancelled until 2 PM. The machinery of a capital city was deliberately slowed to a crawl to keep one banned gathering from finding its footing.

Numbers like these deserve perspective. Twenty-seven thousand personnel is a deployment you can feel — at the capital's borders, at every checkpoint, at stations with their shutters down. The question hanging over all of it, and over the stone-pelting at Akashwani Bhawan, is the one opposition voices raised from the start: whether answering a protest over electoral integrity with a citywide lockdown was proportionate, or whether the lockdown itself manufactured the confrontation. Police rarely detain 1,500 people and nobody throws anything back. The afternoon suggests the equation cut both ways.

04 Detained Before They Left the Plane

The day's most striking detentions never made it to a street. CJP leaders Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka were detained inside their aircraft shortly after their flight from Mumbai landed in Delhi on Saturday, tbsnews.net reported, with inshorts carrying the same account from Daisy Mowke and Shalini Ojha.

The CJP shared a video filmed inside the plane, and in it Dipke is heard saying he is there "only to get detained" — the party's own framing of what was about to happen. That's worth reading carefully: it's the CJP's footage, released by the CJP, with the CJP's leader supplying the line. It tells you how the party wants the moment remembered — a founder walking willingly into custody — not an independent account of what the officers did or said. Both outlets carry the substance of the detention itself; the quote belongs to the party's own video.

Detaining protest leaders inside an aircraft after landing is aggressive even by the standards of a capital lockdown. It means the police were tracking the leadership's movements in real time and chose to neutralize the protest's command before it could assemble one. For a party whose entire plan was a single high-visibility gathering at Jantar Mantar, losing its leaders on the tarmac effectively decapitated the operation before it began — which is also why the protest that unfolded anyway, in fragments and at alternate sites, belonged to no one and answered to no one. Fragmented protests are the ones that throw stones.

05 The 7:48 AM Knock on Dhruv Rathee's Door

The other high-profile detention of the morning was planned with precision. Germany-based YouTuber Dhruv Rathee was detained Saturday morning at his residence in Gurugram's Sector 56. Delhi Police entered the property at 7:48 AM, per News18 as reported by inshorts — that level of timestamp specificity tells you the visit was scheduled, not improvised. Around 50 police personnel had gathered outside his residence late Friday night, per gulte.com shorts via inshorts.

Per the Hindustan Times, as reported by tbsnews.net, Rathee had declined requests from Gurugram and Delhi police teams not to travel to Delhi for the demonstration. Put the pieces together and the sequence is unmistakable: the police warned him off, he didn't agree, and they came for him before dawn with a small army at the door.

Rathee is not a CJP office-bearer — he's a commentator, a YouTuber with a large audience and a long record of criticizing the ruling establishment. Detaining him wasn't about decapitating the protest's leadership; it was about decapitating its audience. A protest that can't be seen can't grow, and Rathee is the kind of amplifier who makes things seen. That's why this detention may matter more than the numbers suggest: it's the state treating reach itself as a law-and-order risk.

06 "I'm Out": The CJP's Own Rift Goes Public

While the party's leaders sat in custody, its internal fractures played out on camera. Vijeta Dahiya — who had been removed as the CJP's spokesperson — posted a video after the detentions in which she teased that she was "out," inshorts reported, citing Arshiya Chopra. She told police to "catch the criminals instead," per the same report.

This is not a footnote. A removed spokesperson going on video the same day her former colleagues are detained, mocking the police while the party is mid-crisis, tells you the CJP's discipline was already coming apart before the lockdown did its work. Parties that hold together under pressure coordinate; parties that don't produce rival videos. The detentions may have weakened the CJP's command structure, but Dahiya's video suggests the structure was already cracked.

07 The Bar Association Calls on the Chief Justice

The legal establishment started to weigh in. The Supreme Court Bar Association urged the Chief Justice of India to intervene in the detention of lawyers, condemning alleged excessive force, per gulte.com shorts via inshorts.

This one needs a clear label: it is single-source. The SCBA statement was reported only through gulte.com shorts, and Previously has not independently verified it or seen corroboration in other outlets. But the claim, if it holds, is significant — when the capital's own bar association asks the Chief Justice to step into a protest crackdown, the dispute has moved beyond streets and stations and into the institutional fabric. Treat the attribution as provisional: gulte.com shorts reported it; nothing else has confirmed it.

08 What the Day Proved, and What It Didn't

Here's what Saturday proved. The CJP's "Jantar Mantar 2.0" never got near Jantar Mantar — the lockdown worked on its own terms. The party's top leadership was in custody before noon, its commentator class was rounded up from their homes, the protest fragmented into small pockets, and roughly 1,500 people spent part of the day detained. If the objective was preventing a mass gathering at the capital's protest address, the objective was met.

Here's what it didn't prove. The underlying demand — the resignation of CEC Gyanesh Kumar over the CJP's allegations of voter-list manipulation in the Special Intensive Revision — is untouched. Nobody answered the allegation; the state answered the logistics. And the stone-pelting at Akashwani Bhawan, two injured officers, and a bar association asking the Chief Justice to intervene are the costs of the method — costs that will now be weighed, loudly, against the achievement.

The honest read is that both things are true at once. The lockdown prevented the protest it banned. And the protest it banned happened anyway — in fragments, without a stage, without a leader, and in at least one case, with stones. Which of those facts lasts longer than Saturday's news cycle is the question the Election Commission, the Delhi Police, and the CJP all get to answer next. Previously will keep following it.