India’s democracy has been backsliding for years. Its youth are drawing a line.

Police and paramilitary forces were already waiting at the central Delhi marketplace when protesters arrived. As the sun slipped low in the sky, about 15 young people emerged, seemingly from nowhere, and began chanting “vote for government” – “vote-thief government.”

Within a minute, Delhi University undergraduate Sakshi Jain was pinned to the ground by an officer in riot gear, and then bundled into a police bus along with her peers.

Small protests like these have been cropping up across Delhi in recent weeks as the government struggles to keep a lid on a growing youth movement known as the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP). The grassroots group, which successfully demanded the education minister’s resignation this summer, has turned its attention to voting rights, calling for India’s chief election officer to step down over the alleged manipulation of voter rolls.

Thousands of protesters – and dozens of journalists – have been detained since demonstrations began earlier this month. Two prominent CJP activists were released Wednesday evening from Delhi’s high-security Tihar Prisons, after seven days in custody. The city is on tenterhooks, with yellow barricades and roaming security forces dotting the streets.

But the protests and subsequent crackdown have had a galvanizing effect for many civil society and opposition party leaders, who have long criticized India’s democratic backsliding under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. They say this moment feels like a turning point.

“Modi is scared,” says Ms. Jain from behind a metal grill as the police bus pulls away. “He is using the police to crush us. We are on the roads to save the constitution of this country, to save democracy.”

Dispute over voting rights

These protests come amid a massive exercise to verify and update India’s voter lists. More than 130 million names have been removed during a voter registration update by the Election Commission. The commission, the constitutional body responsible for overseeing elections, says the deletions include people who have died, moved, registered more than once, or could not be traced. Yet the scale and timing of the purge – particularly in West Bengalwhere the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party just celebrated its first election victory in May – has raised concerns among some academics and opposition parties that eligible voters are being removed by malpractice.