Indira Gandhi International Airport

This is the story of Air India Flight 101.

Air India Flight 101 departed Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi at 2 o'clock in the morning on September 10th, 2018.

The journey to New York would take 15 hours.

On board were 342 passengers and 15 crew.

Can the police stop you before you reach a protest? Delhi Police has invoked Section 163 of the BNSS, which allows authorities to impose urgent restrictions to prevent threats to public order.

Look at what happened at the Delhi's Indira Gandhi International Airport.

In the case of CJP leaders, that's Abhijeet Dipke, Saurav Das and Ashutosh Rangka, they were picked up by the police even before they could get off the plane.

They are here to arrest us directly from the flight.

Definitely.

And if you see, yesterday I was at the airport in Delhi Airport-

Mm-hmm

... and one person walks to me and said, "Are you Chandan?" [laughs] "Yes." Uh, "You're all over my LinkedIn."

He's now held up to the standards of every legacy politicians who's had decades of PR training.

And here he was on October 10th, trying to land in a plane with two of his co-leaders back at Delhi Airport so that they could jointly lead the protest.

The moment that the plane landed, police entered the plane, detained Dipke and his co-leaders, separated them, and brought them each to different undisclosed locations where they would stay for the next 24 hours without access to their phones while the protests were going on in central Delhi leaderless.

Are the protests still going on now?

So all of this taken together is a deeply disturbing picture of the fairness of the electoral process in India.

So I mentioned the backlash coming from the cockroach janitor party, and one of its leaders, in fact the founder of the cockroach janitor party, was arrested at New Delhi Airport, Abhijeet Dipka.

He, uh, is an interesting character in he comes from a Dalit family.

He's 31 years old, trained in public relations here in the United States, and he captivated the youth of India When one of the ministers described young people as cockroaches, his six words were, "What if all the cockroaches came together?" And that happened, right? And he w- asked the question nationally, "Why is the prime minister so scared of the country's youth and the country's people?" So that question still lingers, doesn't it, Sumit?

Additional petitions tied to habeas rights and allegations of unlawful force remained pending before the bench.

Three CJP figures held at Delhi airport on preventive grounds, Abhijit Dipke, Ashutosh Ranka, and Saurav Das, were brought before an executive magistrate and freed on Sunday morning, each released under a surety of 50,000 rupees with a court-imposed obligation to keep the peace for the following 12 months.

The CJP described the outcome as a legal win, noting the release of its members after a detention period of close to 24 hours.

Delhi police maintained that the precautionary detentions had been conducted in keeping with established legal protocols.