Online Desk: Four former chief ministers – Mamata Banerjee, Arvind Kejriwal, Pinarayi Vijayan and Manik Sarkar – as well as several MPs, former MPs and ministers were also detained today during their protests seeking the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over ‘vote chori’.

They were detained from different locations as they staged separate protests. While Vijayan, along with senior Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPI-M) leaders, marched to Jantar Mantar from nearby Kerala House, Mamata staged a protest outside the residence of Trinamool MP Derek O’Brien in South Avenue, bordering Rashtrapati Bhavan, after she was prevented from stepping out. Sarkar and Kejriwal held separate protests with CPI(M) and AAP workers.

Mamata sat in protest along with four Trinamool MPs – O’Brien, Dola Sen, Pratima Mondal and Samirul Islam – and former MP Saket Gokhale, but they were detained, with the party saying that she was taken in a ‘prison van’ used for transporting jail inmates.

Sharing a video of the van in which they were taken, Samirul Islam posted on ‘X’, “Is this a Super Emergency? For the past one and a half hour, we have been driving around the entire city of Delhi, and we don’t know what they are going to do with us. Isn’t this a Super Emergency?” As the police van took rounds of the city without taking them to a police station, the MPs sang songs in protest. Finally, they were taken to Dwarka, where Mamata and others sat on a dharna.
“We are treated like criminals and murderers. If they had to detain us, they should have sent a police van and not a van used to ferry prisoners,” she told reporters from the police station where she was detained.

From a police van, Kejriwal posted a video saying, “The youth in the country are awakened. People will no longer be scared of Modi’s dictatorship. Gyanesh Kumar will have to resign. People will no longer tolerate ‘vote chori’.”

Vijayan was picked up from near Kerala House, where he and other CPI-M Polit Bureau and Central Committee members marched to Jantar Mantar.

Senior MP John Brittas, who was detained along with Vijayan, said they were driven around the city for a long time without any consideration for the 80-year-old former Chief Minister’s health. He claimed that Delhi Police personnel did not even listen to their requests to provide medicines when Vijayan felt uncomfortable.