Around 1,000 protesters gathered opposite Central Park in Delhi’s Connaught Place on Friday for the Cockroach Janta Party’s Tiranga March, after the New Delhi Municipal Council sealed the park and participants assembled on the road near Palika Bazaar.
The gathering brought together protesters raising concerns about democratic participation, the situation in Manipur and Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Many participants held the national flag and raised slogans outside Gates 1 and 2 of Palika Bazaar, according to accounts from people who attended the march.
Udit, a 30-year-old resident of Ghaziabad, said he had come to question why people were being stopped from hoisting the Tricolour. Standing outside Gate No. 2, he said he was concerned by the deployment of security forces to prevent what he described as a democratic process.
The sealing of Central Park shifted the gathering from the public space to the surrounding road. The incident highlighted how access to a central public venue can shape the conduct and visibility of a protest in one of Delhi’s busiest commercial and transport districts. The supplied report did not specify the NDMC’s reasons for sealing the park.
Yasira, a 22-year-old education counsellor working in Gurgaon and originally from Manipur, attended the march to raise concerns about the situation in the state. She said she wanted greater public attention to what she described as a prolonged conflict and also spoke about prejudice faced by people from Manipur, including being called Chinese.
The gathering also drew young people who said they had discovered the protest through social media. Shivam, 22, from Bhopal, said he decided to attend after watching videos on YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels. He described the event as a social media-led movement and said he was concerned about issues that, in his view, received limited attention on television news channels.
Another participant, Sonu Yadav, 25, an MA sociology student from Bhind in Madhya Pradesh, said he had been staying in Delhi for three days to protest against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Yadav said he had been detained twice during that period, but the report did not provide details of the detentions or identify the authority involved.
Yadav said elections affected decisions on employment, education, medicines and other areas of daily life. He linked his participation to concerns about unemployment and the role of elected representatives in making public policy. He also said he had participated in a NEET protest and had spent 15 days there.
The march therefore combined several concerns: the use of public space for political assembly, the experience of protesters around police or administrative restrictions, demands for attention to Manipur and criticism related to elections. The Central Park sealing and the movement of participants onto the surrounding roads remained the immediate civic issues reported from Connaught Place.
