Three Women Journalists Accuse Delhi Police of Sexual Harassment During Voter-Roll Protests

Three female journalists have levelled allegations of sexual harassment against police officers in India's capital, Delhi, amid a widening wave of street protests against the country's election authority. The complaints, filed on Saturday, accuse officers of inappropriate touching while they were covering demonstrations in the heart of the city.

The allegations emerged as Delhi Police detained large numbers of young people who had gathered to demand the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. According to a social media statement issued by the force, its New Delhi District unit received the complaint and has since referred the matter to the crime branch for what it described as a fair and impartial investigation.

The protests have now entered their third consecutive day, with thousands of demonstrators taking to the streets in both Delhi and Mumbai on Sunday. At the centre of the unrest is Kumar, whom protesters want removed from office over sweeping revisions to India's voter rolls, a process that has sparked fierce political controversy across the country.

The Election Commission has defended the revision, insisting it is designed to purge duplicate and ineligible entries from the electoral register. Officials say the exercise has already resulted in some 130 million names being removed from the voters' list. The commission argues that the last such revision took place nearly twenty-five years ago, and that the register urgently needs updating to reflect deaths, emigration, and voters who have relocated and are registered in more than one place.

Critics, however, contend that the process risks disenfranchising legitimate voters, and opposition parties have accused Kumar of manipulating the rolls to benefit Prime Minister Narendra Modi's Bharatiya Janata Party. Both the BJP and the Election Commission have firmly rejected those accusations, maintaining that the revision is a routine administrative necessity rather than a political manoeuvre.

Video footage circulating online appears to show people being physically dragged away from the protest site at Jantar Mantar, a well-known location for demonstrations in central Delhi. The accounts given by the three women journalists describe being touched inappropriately by officers during the chaos, adding a new and serious dimension to the ongoing confrontation between protesters and security forces.

The allegations have drawn sharp condemnation from political opponents of the government. Rahul Gandhi, a leading figure in the opposition, said women now fear for their safety and demanded that the home ministry explain its actions. His intervention underscores how the treatment of protesters, and particularly of women, has become a flashpoint in an already charged political atmosphere.

Further testimony came from Aahna Singh, an activist and student at Jawaharlal Nehru University, who told the Reuters news agency that police had dragged her by her hair during the demonstrations. She characterised the police response as an exercise in brutality, a claim consistent with the broader complaints voiced by protesters and observers at the scene.

The Press Club of India has weighed in forcefully, calling for immediate action against the officers named in the harassment complaints. In a statement, the organisation said it was shocked and dismayed by the way journalists had been treated while carrying out their professional duties, warning that such behaviour cannot be normalised in a democracy.

The club stressed that reporters must be permitted to work freely and without fear, particularly when documenting the grievances of citizens who gather to raise a range of issues. Its intervention reflects growing concern within India's media community that press freedom and the physical safety of journalists are under threat during periods of political unrest.

The demonstrations have drawn support from a variety of groups, including backers of the influential Cockroach Janta Party, a movement that began as an online satirical campaign before evolving into a significant pressure group. The CJP scored its first major victory in July, when weeks of protests over education reforms forced the resignation of the then Education Minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.

The CJP called for the current round of protests following a report in The Indian Express which revealed internal divisions at the Election Commission. According to that report, Kumar's two fellow election commissioners, Sukhbir Singh Sandhu and Vivek Joshi, had formally objected at least fourteen times over a ten-month period to decisions and orders they claimed had been issued without their knowledge.

Those objections were reported to centre largely on the contentious revision of the electoral rolls, known as the Special Intensive Revision, or SIR, which got under way last year. The disclosure fuelled a political firestorm, with opposition leaders seizing on the apparent discord within the commission to renew their calls for Kumar's resignation.

The Election Commission has responded by defending its internal processes, stating that differing views are a natural part of decision-making and that all final decisions were ultimately taken unanimously. That defence has done little to quiet the critics, who argue that the reported objections point to a serious breakdown in transparency at the highest levels of the institution.

As the protests stretch into a third day across two major cities, the allegations of sexual harassment against police officers have raised the stakes considerably. With the crime branch now investigating, the coming days will test both the authorities' willingness to hold their own personnel accountable and the resolve of a protest movement that shows little sign of dispersing.