Cover Profile | In The Battle Of Ideologies, Neha Bora And The Future Of Indian Left

On October 4, the third day of intense protests demanding the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar, Ashoka Road—a stone’s throw away from key nerve centres such as Parliament House and Central Secretariat—wears a deserted look. Rigged with barricades, it lies on the route to Jantar Mantar, the 18th-century structure that, until recently, was Delhi’s monument to protest and dissent. Lining this arterial road stand hundreds of personnel from the Delhi Police, the Central Reserve Police Force and the Rapid Action Force, ready to pounce on any slogan-shouting demonstrators and herd them into waiting police vans and private buses. Those already rounded up keep shouting slogans, their heads poking out of the windows. Some try to leap out. Some of their friends run alongside, trying to keep pace with the moving vehicles.

Suddenly, a chant pierces the air: “Gyanesh Kumar istifa do!” Heads turn. A protester has climbed on to the line of barricades in the middle of the road. Others follow. The police bring most of them down quickly. One refuses to give in. A woman officer climbs up to wrestle the protester off while others grab from below. Each time the protester shakes free of their hands, the chants only grow louder. When the officers finally bring the protester down, the struggle moves to the ground. It takes several of them, visibly exhausted, to lift and carry the protester away. As they do, the protester flashes a victory sign and a wide smile.

Meet Neha Bora, the 29-year-old national president of the All India Students’ Association (Aisa) and one of the most recognisable faces of the youth protests that have gripped India’s cities for months. With around 1.2 million followers on Instagram, Bora (who identifies as they/them) now holds real influence on the very platforms that are reshaping how young Indians encounter politics.

The image of a fighting Bora flashing a victory sign and being carried off into a waiting bus has become familiar to supporters as Bora, once again, turns detention into an act of protest. Having joined the student agitation over irregularities in the National Eligibility cum Entrance Test in the summer, Bora has been all over social media highlighting the protesters’ demands, clips of which are travelling far and wide. In one of the most widely shared, with more than seven million views, Bora can be seen excoriating Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath at a Gen-Z mahajutan in Gorakhpur on September 14, inspiring hundreds of young people to create their own videos of the speech using the original audio.

Neha Bora’s sudden rise in popularity, as well as the rise of the satirically named Cockroach Janta Party (CJP), marks the coming of age of Gen-Z politics in India.

From Khatima to JNU

Bora, whose father was in the Army, grew up in Khatima, a town in Uttarakhand, in a family that strongly supported the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Bora’s activism began in the second year of undergraduate studies in Delhi, but the Aisa president traces earliest political understanding to experiences closer to home: exposure to different places and people and seeing how power operated within the household and outside it. “These confrontations with power gave me a sense that injustice creeps in when someone is treated in a demeaning manner,” says Bora.

Politics has come at a personal cost. Bora’s father has not spoken to them for years. Bora’s mother did not visit until July this year, when the student leader was on hunger strike. Bora recalls finding it difficult to believe when associates told them that their mother had come to visit. “My activism has strained my relationship, but now I see that my mother openly disagrees with some of what the government is doing,” says Bora.

Before politics, there was theatre. As an English (Honours) student at Aurobindo College, Delhi University, Bora performed with the theatre group Moksha, and later joined Sangwari, a political theatre group that staged plays in neighbourhoods and settlements across Delhi-National Capital Region, including Noida. Theatre and politics converged during the 2019 protests against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC), and again during the farmers’ movement, when Bora took part in songs, plays and collective performances that explained questions of citizenship, inequality and power to the crowds.

The move into student politics was gradual. Bora joined Aisa in 2017, while still at Aurobindo College. From 2019, while pursuing postgraduate studies in performance studies at Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD), Bora was involved in campus campaigns on freedom of expression, hostel rules, gender sensitisation and the handling of sexual-harassment complaints.

Bora went on to become Aisa’s unit secretary at AUD, then its Delhi state secretary and state president. In 2022, Bora joined Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), and by 2023 they were Aisa’s national president. It was a climb through the ranks—from member to organiser to campus, state and national leadership—rather than a sudden leap to prominence.

The Fast and After

In the tradition of the capital’s Left students’ movement, Bora is not an exception. It has regularly thrown up leaders who have stood out on the national stage with the strength of their conviction and the power of their articulation. Bora is only the latest in a long list that also includes Communist Party of India-turned-Congress leader Kanhaiya Kumar.

Like Kumar, Bora is also known for clarity of thoughts and an ability to express a point clearly and concisely, but without losing the spark of conviction. Bora neither rushes sentences nor drags them out, and knows when to pause, which words to stress and when to raise voice. These traits have come in handy in an era when the young people get their news and awareness from two-minute Instagram videos rather than rallies and speeches.

Moreover, Bora’s rise comes at a time when, for the first time since coming to power in 2014, the ruling dispensation seems to be struggling to maintain its control over the political discourse of the nation, particularly among the youth.

JNU Aisa leader Danish Ali says the change in the mood is clearly visible on the ground. Not long ago, she says, many students worried that protesting could jeopardise their academic futures or job prospects. “Some did not want their photographs on social media. Now, they come looking for political space,” she says, adding that every day, they get calls from cities such as Bengaluru and Hyderabad, asking where Bora is, whether Bora can visit a campus or a protest site and, increasingly, how to join Aisa. “People just want to have a conversation,” Ali says.

French political scientist Jean-Thomas Martelli calls activists like Bora “nodal points” or “fast movers”: people with a tradition of protest, ready networks and years of campus mobilising, who move first when something happens. “They already have networks. They already mobilise on campus. The fact that Neha is a central figure is due to the fact that they have experi ence in mobilising fast, in networks, and in making things happen,” he says.

“They get the sense that something is happening, and they say: let us be on the street, let us protest, let us see what happens. They are the ones who would be able to communicate even if the internet is cut. They are the ones who would take the first detention, the first lathi charge. The mass of the protest may come from social media…People will travel from Noida, from Gurgaon, from those places. They will ask: ‘Hi guys, this is the first time we are protesting. How are we supposed to do these things?’ They need people who can tell them how to conduct themselves, to be relaxed and to stay calm,” he says.

‘A Congress Stooge’

Yet, for the ruling party, Bora represents nothing more than a prop, a blunt instrument in the hands of the political opposition intent on tarnishing the image of the government. BJP’s national spokesperson Tuhin Sinha calls Bora a votary of exactly the kind of “anarchism” that opposition leader Rahul Gandhi subscribes to and is eager to promote in the country. Bora’s sudden rise, according to Sinha, can be attributed to Gandhi’s practice of co-opting people from other parties because “he is intellectually bankrupt and has no ideas of his own”, he says. “Gandhi looks for anarchists, as a result of which both the anarchists and the Congress party incur mutual losses and mutual doom,” adds Sinha, predicting that the Gen-Z movement will fizzle out because of the likes of Bora and Gandhi.

Sinha further claims the movement has come to nothing because of the emphasis on replicating a Bangladesh-style regime change in India. In a recent video, Bora had extended a “red salute” to protesters in Bangladesh and said the Gen-Z movement seen in India first started in Bangladesh. However, after the backlash from the BJP, Aisa clarified that the organisation did not want an “anarchic movement in India but democratic restoration”.

Sinha refers to the October 17 student protest in France, where protesters were reportedly seen indulging in looting and arson, to emphasis how student protests can go wrong. “When you fantasise about such bloodshed and want to replicate it in India, with Gandhi as your mentor, the entire movement gets decimated. Whoever Gandhi adopts or co-opts, the movement that person is leading goes for a toss,” he says. Sinha accuses Bora of being the latest in a series of “anarchist torchbearers” such as Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam. Both student leaders were arrested in 2020 and are currently awaiting trial on charges of “masterminding” the 2020 North East Delhi riots.

The BJP and its ecosystem have, in the past, tried to counter student leaders from the Left by terming them anti-national and secessionist. While on the one hand, such allegations can help leaders consolidate their support among the cadre and core supporters, they can pose significant obstacles on the electoral front. For instance, Kanhaiya Kumar lost the 2019 Lok Sabha election from Bihar’s Begusarai to the BJP’s Giriraj Singh by over 4.2 lakh votes. Singh’s campaign sought to portray Kumar’s politics as being against the interests of India. Five years later, Kumar’s second attempt to enter Parliament, this time from North East Delhi, ended in another defeat, with the BJP’s Manoj Tiwari winning by a margin of 1.38 lakh votes.

Standing Firm

Bora, however, does not get rattled by labels such as “anarchist”. Asked about Aisa’s position on violent Naxalism, Bora, in a media interview, argued that the word Naxalbari has become so closely associated with violence that the movement’s original demands for justice are obscured: that those who tilled the land were denied the right to own it, along with minimum wages, dignified treatment, access to the law and recognition as human beings. Its later forms in Bihar, Bora said, grew out of struggles against feudal landlords and the violence they inflicted on Dalit and Muslim communities. Bora was not excusing violence, but cautioning against reducing the movement’s legacy to it. “The poorest of the poor cannot continue to be dehumanised,” said Bora in the interview.

The student activist quashes rumours of her exploring future with the Congress as claimed by many after the student leader was seen with Rahul and Priyanka Gandhi Vadra on a bus headed to Barakhamba Road in Delhi for protest . While Bora has held joint press conferences with Rahul and marched hand in hand with Priyanka, the student leader was also seen with other opposition leaders like Akhilesh Yadav and Mamata Banerjee. Bora is unequivocal about seeing her future with CPI(ML), Aisa’s parent organisation.

Political observers, however, point out that popularity during a movement does not automatically translate into votes, and leaders like Bora may turn out to be more valuable as agitators and organisers than elected representatives as the role of the opposition parties shrink more and more. “In the broader context, Indian democracy is becoming less and less centred around elections...the Opposition is becoming more protest-centric and more social-movement-oriented,” says Martelli. He sees the current agitation against the chief election commissioner as a symbol of thinning trust in the electoral processes. “Because the terrain of mobilisation is social protest, the Left is actually reviving. It is actually stronger than it seems,” he notes.

For now, Bora’s rise reflects both the endurance of older political networks and a new generation’s ability to communicate in forms that did not exist when its predecessors emerged. But a harder test lies ahead, given that the victory sign Bora flashed while being carried away on October 4 was more of a defiant gesture rather than a declaration of success. Whether the current protests can diffuse anger into lasting change—and where Bora goes from here—are questions only the coming years will answer.

Mrinalini Dhyani is senior correspondent, Outlook

Ashlin Mathew is senior associate editor, Outlook