Who came out to protest in Delhi as CJP leadership went missing?

At around 4 pm, the protest announced by the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) in central Delhi was a collection of small groups, with five or six people gathered here and a dozen there. By 5 pm, some of these clusters had grown into larger groups, raising slogans against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar and the government.

As evening set in, the groups began merging, drawing hundreds of people into the inner circle of Connaught Place. Thousands of security personnel deployed across Connaught Place suggested that Delhi was bracing for a major confrontation. But the protest site offered a different picture.

Small groups of students, Left activists and ordinary citizens turned up, but there was no clear meeting point, no visible chain of command, and no leader directing the crowd.

I interacted with dozens of people, young and old. My sample size might have been small, but so was the crowd, relatively speaking, at a protest that followed a Congress march just a week earlier, and compared with the CJP's July demonstration.