New Delhi: Thousands took to the streets of the national capital on Sunday (November 1) as a united opposition INDIA bloc staged a massive show of strength for its “Vote Bachao, Desh Bachao” rally at Delhi’s Ramlila Maidan demanding chief election commissioner Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation over the conduct of the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls.While the call for the protest of the opposition parties led by leader of opposition in the Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi was to demand Kumar’s ouster, the leaders in their speeches targeted Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Union home minister Amit Shah, with Gandhi promising legal action against the two.The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) on the other accused the Congress of “rubbing salt into the wounds” of the victims of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots, with Shah himself alleging that “orders had come from abroad” to hold the rally on its anniversary.“Amit Shah said Narendra Modi is not going anywhere. I am telling you the opposite – Narendra Modi cannot go anywhere. Even if he wants to leave, we will not let him go. After Gyanesh Kumar, we are going to stand right in front of you. Legal action will be taken against you for the vote chori [theft] that you have done,” said Gandhi in his speech to a packed Ramlila Maidan.“The country will get justice. The country will ask for justice for vote theft for Adani, don’t think of escaping. You cannot escape, and … you, Amit Shah and Gyanesh Kumar will face legal action.”The rally at Ramlila Maidan saw one of the largest cadre mobilisations by a united opposition, forming a sea of flags of the Congress, its student wing the National Students’ Union of India, the Samajwadi Party, the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD), and Left parties including the Communist Party of India (CPI), CPI (Marxist) and CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation.Congress leader Rahul Gandhi, with other INDIA bloc leaders, proceeds in an open bus to stage a march from Minto Bridge to Ramlila Maidan. Photo: PTI/Ravi Choudhary.While the Congress and the opposition have faced criticism for being unable to mobilise their cadre in the Modi years, the streets of central Delhi had a different story to tell on Sunday. The rally that began at the Minto Road junction was packed with cadres on both sides of the road, who moved through police barricades as the top opposition leaders arrived in open jeep vehicles before proceeding towards Ramlila Maidan.The pilot jeep included Gandhi, Congress MP Priyanka Gandhi Vadra, Samajwadi Party chief Akhilesh Yadav, former West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee, All India Mamata Trinamool Congress MP Abhishek Banerjee, Peoples’ Democratic Party chief and former Jammu and Kashmir chief minister Mehbooba Mufti, the National Conference’s Farooq Abdullah, CPI(M) general secretary M.A. Baby, the CPI’s D. Raja, CPIML general secretary Dipankar Bhattacharya, the RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav, Nationalist Congress Party (SP)’s Supriya Sule and Shiv Sena (UBT)’s Sanjay Raut.Other opposition leaders followed in subsequent open air jeeps, through the police barricades to Ajmeri Gate and then the Ramlila Maidan.The rally came a day after the opposition held a public impeachment of Kumar at Congress president Mallikarjun Kharge’s residence, where they accused him of “treason against the Constitution”.Taking off from his speech on Saturday, Gandhi said at the rally on Sunday that the 2024 Lok Sabha elections were “illegal”, and it was a “stolen election”.“In 2024, there was a 3% difference between the NDA and us. It was an illegal election, a stolen election. I am not saying this, the Election Commission is. They removed 13.3 crore voters from the list. That is one in every seven Indians, 15% of India’s electorate. What I say comes true. I said something about COVID and it came true. I am saying Gyanesh Kumar will be removed as CEC. He will go to jail,” he said.Gandhi said that vote theft was not “ordinary theft” but described it “in legal terms as rarest of rare”.“Without Gyanesh Kumar, neither would Narendra Modi have become prime minister nor would Amit Shah have become home minister,” he said.People gather under a poster accusing CEC Kumar, PM Modi and HM Amit Shah of “vote chori” in Delhi. Photo: PTI/Salman Ali.“The farmer is not getting his rights. The youth are not getting employment. The labourer is not getting his rights, and the entire wealth has gone into the hands of two or three people. We do not want such an India, and we will not accept such an India.”Before Gandhi, other opposition leaders delivered speeches, including Kharge, who accused the BJP of “choosing voters”.“Who votes for them? They choose themselves. The public does not elect them. The current central government, as well as the governments in Maharashtra, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, are all governments of vote theft. We must remove these thieves. Only if Modi goes will democracy survive,” he said.With elections due in Uttar Pradesh in a few months, the Samajwadi Party’s Akhilesh Yadav broadened his attack on the BJP from vote theft to including the donation embezzlement at the Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.Akhilesh described Ramlila Maidan as the “Haldighati of democracy” and said that those who had formed the Union government from Uttar Pradesh will also be defeated from there.“Those who once came from U.P. will be driven out from U.P. itself,” he said referring to Modi who had contested from Varanasi.“The people of U.P. know how to welcome and how to bid farewell even better. In 2027, such a farewell will happen that the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies will not be able to return again.”Taking a swipe at Uttar Pradesh chief minister Yogi Adityanath’s remarks that over one crore Hindu voters had been deleted in the SIR, Akhilesh said that this figure across 403 assembly constituencies comes to around 31,000 votes per constituency.“The truth is that they want to blame others for their impending defeat. The BJP knows it cannot win among the people and is therefore using the Election Commission,” he said.While the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) had pledged their support to the INDIA bloc’s rally, they remained absent on Sunday. However Banerjee expressed her solidarity with them, describing the SIR as a “special intensive relief” to the BJP while urging the CJP and other youth groups to also express solidarity.The RJD’s Tejashwi Yadav said that while Ramlila Maidan is traditionally “meant for staging the Ramayana, today we have organised a Mahabharata for those who steal votes”.“You are all aware of the game Shakuni played in the Mahabharata. You know your history: the Mahabharata began not on a battlefield, but with a game of dice. And now that Shakuni is playing his game, we are compelled to fight the battle,” he said.Left leaders including Baby and Bhattacharya also delivered speeches, with the former calling for unity to “end vote theft to save democracy” and the latter saying that since Bihar, it has become clear that the SIR is a “surgical strike” against democracy.The Aam Aadmi Party and the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam, both of which are no longer part of the INDIA bloc, stayed away from the rally, though the two parties have separately condemned the SIR.The BJP on the other hand separately held a protest march in the capital, with Delhi chief minister Rekha Gupta leading the ‘Loktantra Bachao, Arajakta Hatao’ (Save Democracy, Remove Anarchy) march to mark the anniversary of the 1984 anti-Sikh riots.Union home minister Shah while addressing an event in Chandigarh on the other hand said that Gandhi had sought to rub salt on the wounds of the victims of the riots by holding the rally on November 1, and alleged that “orders had come from abroad” to hold the rally on the anniversary of the riots.“Look at the Congress party: just as Rajiv Gandhi once remarked that ‘when a big tree falls, the earth shakes’, his son, Rahul Gandhi, has organised a major rally in Delhi today, which is effectively rubbing salt into the wounds of the riot victims,” said Shah.“We assumed that perhaps he was too young at the time, or that he hadn’t studied history and was therefore unaware. Our party held a press conference requesting that they not hold the event on 1-2-3 November – the very days the anti-Sikh riots took place – as it would deeply hurt the sentiments of the Sikh community, including mothers, sisters and children. But they remained adamant. Orders were issued from abroad to hold the rally on the very day that thousands of Sikhs were burned alive.”