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The Cockroach Janta Party wants Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to quit over changes to voter lists.

India has deployed thousands of police and paramilitary personnel in central Delhi and restricted transport in and around the capital ahead of a youth-led protest demanding the resignation of Gyanesh Kumar, the country’s chief election commissioner.

Saturday’s rally, called by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), a youth-based political movement, is expected to be the biggest yet in a wave of near-daily protests over a revision of voter lists that critics say favours Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).

Organisers have billed it as a protest to “Save Democracy”.

Shutdown of central Delhi

Police have not authorised a rally at Jantar Mantar in central Delhi, which authorities usually designate for protests, because they said the request was not made on time and that the CJP had violated undertakings given during earlier protests.

Police have also warned that protesters will face a forceful law enforcement response if they violate the ban.

Roads to the site are blocked with multiple layers of metal barricades, as authorities shut 57 metro stations from Friday night, cancelled several long-distance trains and suspended mobile internet within 4km (2.5 miles) of the protest area until Saturday night, the Indian news agency ANI reported.

India’s Supreme Court said on Friday that some trains must still run and that blanket closure of metro stations is unlikely.

“The dictator would rather shut down the entire national capital and inconvenience millions of citizens than allow a peaceful protest at a designated protest site,” CJP chief Abhijeet Dipke said on X.

The CJP says at least 10,000 people, including protesters travelling to Delhi by train, have been detained across the country.

“You can detain the people, you cannot detain the movement,” said Neha Bora, national president of the All India Students’ Association, who has emerged as a leading face of the protests.

What kicked off the protests

Protesters want Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar to quit over a voter list revision that has removed more than 130 million names.

The Election Commission says the exercise removes duplicate and ineligible voters and aims to prevent “foreign illegal immigrants” from voting.

Critics say it has disproportionately affected marginalised and minority communities.

The protests escalated after the Indian Express reported that Kumar’s two deputies had formally raised concerns at least 14 times in the past 10 months over the revisions.

The Election Commission and the BJP have denied the allegations. The BJP says the opposition is misleading the country because it cannot win elections.

The CJP began online as political satire in May after Chief Justice Surya Kant called unemployed youth “cockroaches”, sparking nationwide outrage. Since then, the CJP has garnered a large following among India’s youth.

The July protests led Modi’s education minister to resign over exam paper leaks. The latest demonstrations come months before a series of state elections in early 2027, including in Uttar Pradesh, India’s most populous state, which the BJP governs.

Al-Awsaj, occupied West Bank – On September 23, weeks before Israel’s parliamentary elections, ministers and lawmakers gathered on an occupied West Bank hilltop to inaugurate a new settlement, Metzoke Eretz, illegal under international law. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich used the ceremony to salute the settler outpost that made the eventual settlement possible.

“The first pioneering settlers who were here on the farm… we will lift them up as our greatest joy,” Smotrich said. “It shows that the method works: establish a farm, seize the land, prepare it, turn it into a community, move to the next point. There are many, many such heroes – those who prove they are not doing real estate. They are doing Zionism.”

Metzoke Eretz was previously an outpost – the name given to the Jewish settlements illegal even under Israeli law – called Netzah Harel, established in 2023 in the middle of al-Muarrajat, a Bedouin community on private Palestinian land east of Ramallah. Alia Mleihat, 29, and others from the community remember those settlers well. “Of course, this outpost played a major role in displacing the Palestinian Bedouin communities in al-Muarrajat and the areas east of Ramallah,” said Alia, now living in a tent in al-Awsaj, a few kilometres away, after her forced displacement in July 2025. “[The Netzah Harel settlers] took part in every attack the settlers carried out on families, and confiscated sheep, under the protection of the Israeli police and army.”

Dror Etkes, founder of Israeli NGO Kerem Navot, said Smotrich’s description of his “method” was spot-on – except for one omission. “The political discourse skips the [Palestinian] expulsion chapter,” said Etkes, suggesting Smotrich and other politicians avoid doing so explicitly to avoid potential scrutiny from international criminal courts. “They want it to happen, and they know that it happens, and they let it happen.”

Haaretz reported that Metzoke Eretz is one of 19 outposts legalised by the Netanyahu government after nearby Palestinians were violently expelled.

‘Not a single moment of joy’

Jamal Mleihat, Alia’s 45-year-old uncle, sits with eight relatives nestled inside a bare concrete-block house on the ridge in al-Awsaj, with his daughter Sewar hanging off his lap.

Below the ridge, rows of young trees climb a cultivated slope towards a factory at the foot of the hills. The ridge itself is rock and dust, now home to about 25 families from al-Muarrajat, among others forcibly displaced in the past three years.

“Before October 7 [2023 Hamas attack on Israel, and Israel’s subsequent genocidal war on Gaza], we were in the pastures – no harassment, we moved around freely,” said Jamal, a father of seven. “We had healthcare. We had a school. We had water in the same encampment. Life was a million times better than this.”

Since October 7, the Israeli government has stepped up its raids on the occupied West Bank, while settlers have largely been given free rein to pursue a pogrom against Palestinians, with little pushback from within Israel.

Just below Jamal’s shelter, alone on a slope, Muhammad Ghawanmeh lives with his wife and seven children. His toilet does not work; he relies on water tanks and has almost no electricity. The rocky track to the Mleihats’ area is too steep to drive. He built a fence around the house after recent settler attacks, and now faces constant drone surveillance from Israeli settlers.

Ghawanmeh is from Ras Ein al-Auja, which had been the largest Bedouin community in the central Jordan Valley – so robust that humanitarian coordinators told Al Jazeera in October 2023 that the village’s displacement was unlikely. Instead, its more than 600 Palestinian inhabitants experienced the largest single-community expulsion of Bedouins in the last three years, after repeated attacks by settlers from four surrounding outposts.

“From my childhood, the land was open. The water was open. We were living happily. We’d graze 10 kilometres, 15 kilometres with the sheep, and come back,” he said. “Today we can’t go 500 metres from the house.”

His flock has shrunk from about 300 to roughly 100 physically thinning sheep, which he now must buy fodder for, instead of letting them graze on the land, which he now says is largely forbidden by Israeli settlers and the army.

‘Nothing was left except this’

A few hundred metres beyond Ghawanmeh’s fence, a white trailer and a few containers mark an Israeli outpost, established about six months ago on a hill overlooking Highway 90 and the displaced families along the ridge. Two months ago, Ghawanmeh said, soldiers came to his house and told him he could no longer pass to the highway. The settlers, he said, “are with the army”.

“You leave this place, go to another one, and it follows you – the same problem, unsolved,” Ghawanmeh said. “Every three months, there’s a displacement operation.”

Al-Awsaj barely existed as an inhabited place before, but Bedouin from different depopulated communities have now converged on this barren ridge, overlooking land largely declared – again – off-limits to grazing.

Allegra Pacheco, head of the West Bank Protection Consortium, calls al-Awsaj “basically a refugee camp, an internally displaced camp, that we see in other countries. But here, there’s no safe space. Wherever people like in al-Awsaj go, they’re chased by settlers or their tents are demolished by the Israelis.”

“It’s been very painful to get the authorities, the Palestinian authorities, the international leaders, to recognise that this is a mass displacement happening in front of us, and people have nowhere to go,” she said.

Project of forced transfer

In the West Bank, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) counts at least 130 Palestinian communities fully or partly displaced by settler attacks and related restrictions since January 2023, and more than 6,400 people uprooted. According to the Palestinian Colonization and Wall Resistance Commission, since October 7, 2023 there have been almost 15,000 attacks by settlers, with 66 Palestinians killed by settlers. OCHA says the rate of settler attacks increased from about three a day before October 7, 2023, to almost seven per day this year.

The increase in displacement after October 2023 can also be seen in the numbers for that year. Nearly 80 percent of all Palestinians displaced by settler violence in 2023 were uprooted after October 7.

A report by Peace Now and Kerem Navot found that Israeli farm outposts had seized roughly 18 percent of the West Bank by the end of 2025. “We’re talking about a land area bigger than the size of the Gaza Strip altogether,” Pacheco said.

“What we’re seeing is a continuous, sustained project of forced transfer and mass destruction,” she said. “Israeli authority demolitions and destructions by the Israeli army, and Israeli civilians – armed groups – carrying out destructions and sowing fear to push people out.”

Israeli NGO B’Tselem’s September report, “The Elimination Project”, links this to Smotrich’s 2017 “Decisive Plan”, which offers Palestinians three choices: live under Jewish supremacy, leave, or face violent repression.

“The Smotrich Plan has been implemented,” Pacheco said. “He laid out exactly what is going on now, and he’s very proud of his success. He now wants to transfer that success to [other areas of the West Bank], and also in the Galilee [an area in Israel with a large population of Palestinian citizens of Israel]. Wherever there are Palestinians living, he wants to make life so difficult that they will leave.”

With Smotrich exercising broad powers over the West Bank through the Settlement Administration within the Ministry of Defence, and leaders in the Israeli West Bank military command increasingly coming from far-right, settler backgrounds themselves, Palestinians across the West Bank describe a deepening symbiosis of military, police, administration and settlers in exacting Palestinian dispossession. “They all work together, like a cell, one completing the other,” said Jamal Mleihat. “The army, the police, the settlers – they’re the ones who displace, they’re the ones who establish the settlement, they’re the ones who take part in the thefts, in everything. And the army covers for them.”

Al Jazeera has reached out to the Israeli authorities for comment on this piece, but has yet to receive a response.

Worse future

Smotrich has withheld part or all of the tax revenues Israel collects for the Palestinian Authority – roughly 60 percent of its income – for much of the past three years. The PA now struggles to provide the most basic of services. In al-Awsaj and elsewhere, that means classrooms that do not open. “The government school is shut down today, no salaries,” Ghawanmeh said.

There is no school bus; families pay for private transport, and “one day they study, one day they don’t, depending on the mood of the driver,” Jamal said. It has left the displaced alone on an inhospitable patch of rock.

“Palestinians have no protection in the West Bank,” said Pacheco. “They are completely vulnerable to assault, attempted murder, arson, invasion of their homes. The Israeli army is supposed to protect them and doesn’t. The Palestinian Authority can’t come in, and the international community is not protecting them.”

“We started to feel there’s no safety anywhere,” Ghawanmeh said. “Fear. Terror. Persecution. Ethnic cleansing. That’s what we feel.”

Amid the dispossession, Ghawanmeh looks out at the unwelcoming land he knows will not be his family’s refuge – only another transient stop. He sees his own brother now only once every month and a half or two. “The threats to Bedouin life have almost become extinction,” he said. “We now live in enclaves, separated.”

“For three years now, the day that’s passing is better than the one that’s coming,” Ghawanmeh said. “Yesterday is better than today. Today is better than tomorrow.”

Government warns of crackdown as supporters of jailed former prime set off from northwest Pakistan towards Islamabad.

Supporters of jailed former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan have set off on a protest march from the country’s northwest after talks with the government to call off the demonstration failed.

More than 5,000 were reported to have begun the rally on Sunday. The march, planned by Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, was originally scheduled for September 27 but was postponed until October 4 to allow talks between the government and the PTI leadership to take place.

However, two rounds of talks over the weekend failed to break the deadlock, and the PTI decided to carry out its plan, which is the latest attempt to pressure the government into releasing Khan, the country’s most popular political figure according to polls, who has been behind bars since August 2023 following a series of convictions that his party calls politically motivated.

All but one of the convictions against the former PM have since been suspended or overturned on appeal.

Videos posted on the PTI’s official social media showed supporters joining the march in different areas of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) province, which is ruled by the party, and setting off in convoys.

Sohail Afridi, the region’s chief minister, had earlier posted on social media that the demonstration in support of Khan would go ahead.

He said the march will make its way to Khairabad, 80 kilometres (50 miles) west of Islamabad, by Thursday, where the plan for the “next phase” will be announced.

Government warns protesters

The government has been preparing for weeks for the arrival of PTI demonstrators in Islamabad. It has erected barriers using shipping containers to block main access routes to the capital.

Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi confirmed earlier on Sunday that the talks between the two sides had failed.  He accused Afridi of “sabotaging” the negotiations, and added that the government would not allow the PTI to “create a disturbance”.

He also cited an Islamabad High Court order from September 14, ruling that no political party or its leadership has the “lawful right to occupy public roads, highways, interchanges, toll plazas and buildings in Islamabad”.

“If they violate the orders, whether they are workers or politicians, whether they are protesting within KP or outside KP, we will pursue them one by one. This time, we want to ensure that these repeated episodes of creating disturbance in Islamabad come to an end,” Naqvi said.

Concerns about the 73-year-old Khan’s health, in particular the condition of his right eye that has required months of specialist treatment, have prompted the PTI’s campaign for his release.

The party has also called for the release of Khan’s three sisters, whose arrests last month further heightened tensions.

James Dorsey, a fellow at the National University of Singapore, said Khan was “essentially a populist leader” with “a genuine popular movement that had broad popular support”.

That is behind the “determination by the government to prevent [the protesters] from entering Islamabad,” he told the AFP news agency.

Given Pakistan’s security concerns, particularly following its unresolved February 2026 conflict with Afghanistan, Islamabad wants to avoid escalation in the face of the protests, he added.

“It’s a problem for the government, but I don’t think it’s an existential threat,” he said.

Protesters say the election commission’s voter-roll revision has removed millions of eligible voters to benefit Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling BJP party.

Thousands of youth and opposition protesters have rallied for a third day in India demanding the resignation of the country’s election commission chief.

Thousands marched in Mumbai on Sunday, while others gathered for a third day of demonstrations in New Delhi. The protests began on Friday demanding that Election Commission of India (ECI) chief Gyanesh Kumar step down due to reports that he has overseen voter-roll revisions removing millions from electoral lists.

Protesters say the disenfranchisement stands to benefit Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Both the ECI and the BJP have denied the allegations.

Led by opposition leaders Raj Thackeray and Uddhav Thackeray, thousands marched in Mumbai on Sunday, waving Indian flags and calling for Kumar to step down.

In the capital, New Delhi, protesters started gathering in the early evening. As on previous days, some were detained by police as they arrived, according to the Reuters news agency.

Police in the capital have clamped down in a bid to prevent protesters from assembling over the last two days, detaining dozens and taking them away by bus.

Some of the detainees were released later on Friday and Saturday, but police registered cases against some on charges of violating orders banning mass gatherings in the centre of the capital.

“⁠I just want to tell the ruling party this much … We are angry about how you are wielding that power. ⁠It’s the people of this country who should decide who sits in power and who sits in opposition, not the election commission,” Raj Thackeray told the crowd in Mumbai.

The ECI says the voter-roll revision is designed to remove duplicate, deceased or ineligible entries and maintain electoral integrity. On Friday, it directed its officials to register eligible voters inadvertently omitted from electoral rolls.

Kumar has not publicly responded to the demands for his resignation or commented on the protests, which look set to continue over the coming days, with more rallies planned.

An alliance of India’s opposition parties plans to launch protests to “save democracy” with a march to the election commission office on Tuesday. The Gen Z-led Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) has announced plans for a major rally in New Delhi on October 10.

“Mumbai is out on the streets again for free and fair elections!” Abhijeet Dipke, chief of the CJP, said in a social media post on Sunday.

“Solidarity with all the protesters,” he added. “All Indians need to come together. It’s now or never!”

Both decrees to tackle housing affordability crisis shot down as critics say measures would tighten the housing market.

Spain’s government has lost key votes to ratify emergency measures aimed at tackling the nation’s housing affordability crisis, after protests intensified last month following the eviction of an 87-year-old woman.

The proposed measures, which comprised two separate decrees, were both shot down by the majority of ⁠the 350-seat lower house of parliament on Friday.

The move is a heavy blow to Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, whose government faces public pressure, including from the hundreds of protesters who had gathered outside parliament demanding help for renters.

The first decree was meant to stop evictions of vulnerable people, make real estate speculation harder, impose tighter restrictions on short-term leases and provide tax incentives to encourage renting and the construction of housing.

The second decree proposed making leases automatically renew when they are set to expire, essentially making them indefinite. A property owner would have to pay a tenant 12 months of rent to break the contract.

The right-wing ⁠Catalan separatist ⁠party Junts refused to back the housing decrees, saying they would ultimately tighten the housing market. The centre-right Popular Party and far-right Vox also voted against the measures.

Sanchez, who leads a coalition government composed of his Socialist Party and the far-left Sumar, ⁠appealed to lawmakers in the run-up to the vote to put aside political calculations and pressure.

“Think about ordinary people, about those who most need the protection of public institutions. Think about the millions of young people who ⁠cannot afford to ⁠move out of their parents’ homes. Think about the families living with the constant ⁠anxiety of ever-rising rents,” he said.

“Do the right ⁠thing, because I ⁠believe that if you do not, history will judge you sooner than you ‌think, and far more harshly than you can imagine.”

Miriam Nogueras of Junts argued the decrees would only lead to owners removing their properties from the rental market, and thus driving up prices even further.

“These decrees still allow speculators to buy property and to evict people,” Nogueras said.

‘Your profits, our misery’

As the vote was under way, protesters marched on the parliament demanding help for renters.

The government decrees were intended to quell a public uproar following the televised eviction on September 23 of Maria del Carmen Abascal, known across Spain as Maricarmen, that set off protests and a camp-in that occupied Madrid’s Puerta del Sol square ever since.

Abascal was living in the property in Madrid’s central Retiro neighbourhood under a rent-capped lease contract signed by her father in the 1950s. The property was then bought by the real estate and investment firm Urbagestion in 2018.

Urbagestion sought to terminate Abascal’s contract and evict her after raising her rent from 500 euros ($572) to 2,650 euros ($3,010) – nearly double her pension of 1,350 euros ($1,533) a month – according to Spanish newspaper El Pais.

When the police carried out her eviction on their fourth attempt, hundreds of activists who had been protesting against her losing a home she had lived in her entire life were waiting outside. Abascal has since been offered a preliminary agreement that would allow her return to her home.

Protesters rallying at the chamber in downtown Madrid on Friday held up homemade signs with images of vultures on them, denouncing the real estate speculators they blame for driving up prices.

Some people gathered outside the assembly chanted “your profits, our misery” as lawmakers voted down the government’s decree.

The average rent in Spain has almost doubled in the past 10 years. The average price per square metre has risen from 8.20 euros (about $9.08 at the time) in 2016 to 15.1 euros ($17.15) this year, according to the real estate website Idealista.

Moscow mayor reports intercepting 1,600 drones during ‘unprecedented’ attack, accusing Ukraine of election interference.

At least two people have been killed and a major refinery has been damaged as hundreds of drones targeted the Russian capital, Moscow, and its surrounding region on the final day of the country’s parliamentary elections.

Moscow’s Mayor Sergei Sobyanin said on Sunday that more than 1,600 drones had been intercepted and shot down, 450 of which were heading for Moscow.

He also accused Ukraine of attempting to interfere with a tightly controlled three-day election that is set to tighten President Vladimir Putin’s 26-year grip on power.

“The unprecedented attack was clearly planned with the aim of disrupting the elections. The enemy did not succeed,” he said on Telegram.

Moscow regional Governor Andrey Vorobyov said on social media that a 44-year-old woman and an elderly man were killed in two separate locations.

A fire triggered by a drone crashing into a 21-storey building forced the evacuation of 400 people, Vorobyov said.

The strikes come as Kyiv has intensified its long-range drone campaign against Russia, particularly targeting energy infrastructure to cut off a vital source of Kremlin revenue used to fund its war effort, now in its fifth year.

“A facility on the territory of the Moscow Oil Refinery has been damaged,” Sobyanin added, saying that no casualties were reported so far and emergency services were on the scene.

The major refinery has already been hit by Ukrainian strikes in recent months.

The latest strike follows claims by US President Donald Trump on Monday that Ukraine and Russia had agreed not to target each other’s energy facilities.

It also comes as Russians vote in the country’s first parliamentary elections since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022, igniting a war that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Moscow has also organised voting in parts of Ukraine that it has seized in the four-and-a-half-year war.

Meanwhile, Ukraine’s Air Force Command reported that Russia launched 138 drones of various types across the country overnight, according to the Interfax-Ukraine news agency.

It added that air defences managed to shoot down or neutralise 101 of them.

Lawyers criticised mass arrests under emergency powers that allowed authorities to detain people without charge.

The Caribbean country of Trinidad and Tobago has ended a state of emergency that granted the government extraordinary powers to combat crime, including the ability to imprison people without charge.

The country’s prime minister told parliament on Wednesday that the government would not extend the state of emergency. One was issued in 2024 and another in 2025, with extensions lengthening both. Instead, the government would seek a “permanent legal framework”.

“The proposed legislation will establish a permanent legal framework for targeted operations against violent crime, gangs, illegal weapons and the criminal networks that finance them, while providing safeguards for law-abiding citizens, judicial oversight and parliamentary accountability,” Prime Minister Kamla Persad-Bissessar said in a social media post.

The government had faced criticism for a campaign of mass arrests that suspended key civil liberties in what it said was in the name of cracking down on crime and those the government deemed threats to security. A prominent businessman and his wife were among those arrested over alleged involvement in a plot to assassinate the prime minister, but were never charged and later released.

The measures were last extended in June, with the prime minister stating that more than 5,800 people have been arrested since a March extension. About 2,250 of those have yet to be charged, and it remains to be seen whether they will be released now that the state of emergency has ended.

Lawyer Criston Williams told The Associated Press news agency that he expects some of those detained without charge to bring lawsuits against the government and called for the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights to investigate possible abuses by the government.

“They are transported to us blindfolded, shackled, hands behind their backs, a gray knapsack over their heads,” he said, adding that meetings with lawyers took place in the presence of five armed men from law enforcement, “who refer to themselves as operator one, two, three, four, five. There’s a camera above, so guess what, there’s nothing like attorney-client privilege.”

Police reported a record 624 killings in the country of about 1.4 million people in 2024, a figure that police say dropped to 369 in 2025. Police state that 255 killings have been recorded this year, compared with 268 over the same period in 2025.