India’s capital locked down as youth protest targets election chief

NEW: Central Delhi sealed off with thousands of police and paramilitaries deployed, metro stations shut, mobile internet suspended and markets closed as a youth protest demands India's chief election officer resign.

Delhi is sealed off this morning, and the trigger is a voter list.

Thousands of police and paramilitaries are on the streets of the capital, and you can see the barricades going up here. Metro stations shut, mobile internet suspended, markets closed. All of it to contain a youth protest demanding the resignation of India's Chief Election Commissioner, Gyanesh Kumar.

The movement calls itself the cockroaches, and their protest is billed as Save Democracy. It started last week after the Indian Express reported that Kumar's own deputies disagreed with him over a revision that removed around 130 million names from voter rolls. Critics say the cull favours Prime Minister Modi's BJP, and opposition parties have been saying exactly that for a long time.

So here's where it stands. A government confident in its voter lists just switched off the internet in its own capital.

This is Sara White, reporting for HIT.