Photo Credit: Abhijeet Dipke X Account
Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka are in Tihar jail for five days. Police say they broke the law at Jantar Mantar. Their party says they were jailed for waving India’s flag.
Abhijeet Dipke, founder of India’s youth-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), has asked supporters to gather in New Delhi on Friday carrying the national flag. His call comes two days after two of the party’s leaders were sent to jail.
The gathering is planned for 5 p.m. on October 16 at Central Park in Connaught Place, in the centre of the capital. Dipke calls it “Lehra do Tiranga”, which means “Wave the Tricolour” in Hindi. The Tiranga is India’s saffron, white and green national flag.
“We will wave the Tricolour there and show that waving a Tiranga is not a crime,” Dipke said in a video posted on X on Wednesday, the news agency IANS reported.
He asked people who cannot reach Delhi to hold flag marches in their own cities that evening.
Why two leaders are in jail
Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, the party’s two co-conveners, were sent to five days of judicial custody on Wednesday, October 14. They are being held in Tihar, Delhi’s main prison.
Police say the two men went into Jantar Mantar on Tuesday morning. Jantar Mantar is a short street near India’s Parliament that was Delhi’s official protest site for years. It no longer is.
Police also say the men broke prohibitory orders and peace bonds, and blocked officers on duty. A peace bond is a written promise to the authorities to stay out of trouble. Cases were filed at two Delhi police stations, Connaught Place and Parliament Street.
The two men were taken before a special executive magistrate, an official who can hold people to prevent trouble before it happens. Police asked for custody because they said the men could break the rules again and push others to do the same if they were freed.
The peace bonds were new. Das and Ranka signed them after being detained at the party’s protest on October 10, promising to keep the peace for one year. Police say they broke that promise three days later.
A third leader, Ajinkya Shinde, was let go after promising to keep the peace for six months. He also had to give a surety of 5,000 rupees (about $60), PTI reported.
“They have been sent to judicial custody for five days,” said Abhisht Hela, the lawyer for all three men.
The arrests come less than three months after the party made a deal with the government. On July 25, the CJP ended a 49-day protest over a leaked medical entrance exam after talks with ministers JP Nadda and Jitendra Singh. The government agreed to drop cases against those protesters, Khaleej Times reported.
“We are ending this in good faith, with the understanding that the agreed-upon terms will be executed,” Das said at the time.
Dipke’s response
Dipke says the real reason is the flag.
“Saurav and Ashu have been jailed only for unfurling the tricolour,” he said.
He thinks he could be next. “It is possible that I might be arrested after this, but I am not stressed about that,” he said.
Police have not publicly said that the flag had anything to do with the arrests.
What happened at Jantar Mantar
The Cockroach Janta Party is new. It was formed in May, after India’s Chief Justice, Surya Kant, called some unemployed young people “cockroaches”. He later said he meant people who got jobs with fake degrees. The young protesters took the insult and made it their party’s name.
Its biggest fight now is with India’s Election Commission, the body that runs the country’s elections. The party wants Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to resign. It also wants a stop to the nationwide review of voter lists that began in 2025.
Critics say this review could wrongly remove millions of real voters and help Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The Election Commission denies this. It says it is only removing duplicate and ineligible names, the news agency AFP reported.
On October 10, the party tried to hold a large protest at Jantar Mantar. Thousands of police were deployed. Metro stations were closed, and mobile internet was cut near the protest site. Dipke and other leaders were detained, and later released.
The party says more than 15,000 people were detained that day. AFP could not confirm that number. The United Nations human rights office called on India to free those “arbitrarily detained”.
Two days later, on October 12, Delhi Police removed Jantar Mantar from the list of places where protests are allowed. In its place they named three grounds: Ramlila Ground, Burari Ground and CBD Ground. The change followed advice from a committee set up by India’s Home Ministry, ANI reported.
The next morning, Das and Ranka went to Jantar Mantar with the flag and shouted slogans against Gyanesh Kumar before police took them away. In a post on X, Dipke wrote: “You cannot de-notify the resistance.”
What happens next
Friday’s gathering at Central Park is the next test. Central Park is not one of the three protest sites the police have approved. Delhi Police had not said in public whether they would allow the gathering.
Das and Ranka’s five days in custody end on October 19.
By The Lion Capital Editorial Team | October 2026