DELHI, India—Indian authorities enforced an unprecedented crackdown on demonstrations across Delhi on Saturday and Sunday, as student groups and citizen networks, including lawyers and doctors organized to provide support for people protesting a massive purge of voter lists. The government deployed over 20,000 police and paramilitary personnel to prevent protestors from gathering in the city, pulling forces from border areas, including Kashmir, into Delhi.

For the past two weeks, protestors across India have been demanding the resignation of India’s chief election commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar, after an investigation by The Indian Express, a prominent daily, revealed that the country’s election commission had deleted more than 130 million people from voter rolls without due process.

The call for large demonstrations on Saturday was made by the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP), which in July led widespread protests against the education minister Dharmendra Pradhan for irregularities in nationwide examinations, leading to his resignation. On Saturday, Delhi police detained Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of CJP, along with several other leaders of the group, on their airplane when they arrived at the Delhi airport, holding them until Sunday morning.

The mobilization was supposed to be held at the designated protest site of Jantar Mantar, but it was entirely barricaded by the police, and most of central Delhi was under police lockdown.

As protesters began entering the neighboring areas, police detained anyone who appeared to be heading towards the protest site.

“I reached Delhi from Punjab early in the morning and have been here since,” said Karan Singh, who had travelled alone to attend the protests. “It was incredibly difficult to reach here, I had to walk for almost an hour. The police presence in the area makes it feel like it’s fully a dictatorship,” he said.

Drop Site saw protestors being detained within minutes of chanting slogans, or as soon as they merely came close to the barricaded roads outside Jantar Mantar. It wasn’t just protestors—many were picked up from far beyond the protest premises, from arbitrary spots in the city, without explanation. “I didn’t know anything about the protest, I am in the city for some work with my wife. The police just whisked me away without informing me why,” said Mohammad Rahim, who was detained along with nearly 40 others in front of the New Delhi Railway Station.

In addition to the brute force applied by security forces, members of the right-wing Hindu Raksha Dal (Hindu Protection Force), who mobilized in support of the Narendra Modi government, were seen harassing some protestors. In a video that’s now gone viral, four men were seen attacking a man and a woman, beating them up, with the police not intervening to stop them. The four were arrested on Sunday.