BENGALURU: Neha Bora escaped from a police van in Delhi in full view of media cameras. The young activist stood at the van’s door, and as soon as the vehicle moved, held a friend’s hand, jumped out into the crowd of protesters, and rapidly walked away.
The Delhi police had detained Bora for leading thousands of young people in demanding the resignation of India’s Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar. Protesters and opposition parties have alleged that Kumar took unilateral decisions that led to the deletion of over 130 million voters in the most extensive Special Intensive Revision (SIR) voter roll revisions the country has undergone.
Bora escaped detention twice since Oct 2, when the protest began at the Jantar Mantar monument, a designated protest site in Delhi.
When finally detained and released dozens of kilometres away, Bora filmed a video from a car: “They think we are dogs, cockroach, vermin. But we are the citizens of this country, who have the right to ask questions of our government system. And if we are removed from a designated protest site, we will go back again to assert our rights.”
Bora’s televised rebellion has become a symbol of India’s Gen Z protests. When the police drag Bora on the road, the protester leans back, face placid but eyes blazing, and delivers pitch-perfect political rhetoric in literary Hindi and English.
The bespectacled 29-year-old wearing oversized T-shirts or simple cotton tops, who prefers the pronouns they/them, could disappear in a campus crowd. But the tough-talking student has hit the front pages of most Indian newspapers.
Hindi media are calling her a “national crush” or a “sherni” – lioness.
As the national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), Bora has inspired more to join the protest, young and old. AISA was the organising force behind the Gen Z protest against exam paper leaks in July spearheaded by Abhijeet Dipke, the founder of the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP).
Bora caught national attention in July when the activist went on a 23-day hunger strike along with two other AISA members and educationist Sonam Wangchuk. The strike forced education minister Dharmendra Pradhan to resign, a first for a minister in the Narendra Modi government.
Opposition party leaders including Rahul Gandhi held press conferences with the student leader, while Bollywood celebrities, such as Shabana Azmi, came to the protest site to help end a weak Bora’s fast.
Literature professor Swati Moitra, some of whose students from Gurudas College in Kolkata also joined Gen Z protests in the eastern city, said: “In a society like ours, we are always on the lookout for heroes. So it was inevitable that a young woman who is so articulate and so brave, becomes a larger-than-life figure, especially in the age of social media.”
“The hostile behaviour of the police is nothing new to us,” Bora told The Straits Times, praising Gen Z protesters for their “ingenuity and fierce energy” in evading police violence.
“The more you beat us up and curb our rights, the more prepared we are to find new ways to fight your force.”
Yogendra Yadav, a senior political activist and commentator, said that the young activist’s popularity was a thorn in the side of the Modi government. He jokingly posted on X on Oct 5 suggesting the police “relax” as Bora was not in town that day.
“The police are clearly scared of Neha because this person has become a symbol of resistance, the kind of spontaneous protest that has the Delhi police flummoxed,” said Yadav, who was among several detained in Delhi.
Other detained protesters are also escaping detention like Bora, by jumping out of police vans, squeezing out through windows, writhing away from police hands, and blocking police vans. One woman even snatched the keys of a police bus full of detained protesters and ran away.
In response, the Delhi police that faced a backlash for tear-gassing and beating up students on July 20, is now occupied in the Sisyphean feat of scooping up hundreds of Gen Z protesters over and over to remove them from the protest site.
Simultaneously, the CJP called for a “jail bharo andolan” (fill the jails campaign) in Mumbai on Oct 2 asking protesters to court arrest until the Chief Election Commissioner resigns and the SIR is halted. There too, protesters were detained and let off, but the police filed complaints of unlawful assembly against CJP members and 400 unidentified participants.
Gen Z comprise around 30 per cent of eligible voters today, and “the political cost of plain repression is bound to be high,” Yadav told ST.
Bora’s traction is as obvious as it is surprising.
As part of AISA, a students’ wing affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, Bora has been involved in campus movements since 2018.
“Every AISA member develops the capacity for public action, of organising and mobilising people. What we are seeing now is the maturing of Neha’s years of political activism,” said Neville Thomas, an AISA member who is doing a PhD in sociology at the Jamia Milia Islamia University.
Bora also credited their experience in the Delhi-based street theatre group Sangwari with learning “how to speak in public, things like throwing your voice, modulation, expression”, as well as the “human exercise of empathy” while playing various characters, which became cornerstones for their activism.
Bora is now pursuing a PhD on folk theatre practices in the activist’s native state of Uttarakhand at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Arts and Aesthetics in New Delhi.
Supporters of Modi’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party are not fans of Bora’s leftist background and criticism of government policies, which they dismiss as “anti-national” for questioning government decisions.
But Bora has largely avoided such stereotypes.
“We don’t have many self-made women making it to the public stage in India. Most are celebrities or dynasts. Neha has an ordinary family upbringing and is standing with people in difficult times -- it resonates with many,” said Sai Balaji, a former president of AISA and now CPI(ML) member.
Bora’s mother is a homemaker and father a recently retired army officer.
Part of Bora’s public appeal, Balaji said, is also because of AISA’s agenda-focused alliance with the CJP, which has no overt ideological framework, but whose irreverence “brought a freshness” to a long-standing call for government accountability.
“Young people look for inspiration, someone to look up to. At this moment, Neha Bora and Abhijeet Dipke have emerged as voices of courage who risk everything speaking truth to power,” Balaji said.
Bora’s ability to engage with those who hold polar opposite views also comes from home, where politics was taboo.
“My father has not talked to me in years because I am associated with left-wing politics,” Bora told ST.
“My mother over the recent months has turned away from her obstinate support to the government and is able to see cracks in the government’s narrative. She still sometimes questions why we (as leftists) only see the negative side of the government. I try to engage with her, and slowly I hope her mind is changing,” Bora said.
Moitra noted that activists like Bora have a long, rocky road ahead: “Gen Z is not a coherent mass with the same class or political identity.” In her West Bengal state, young first-time voters had overwhelmingly voted for the Hindu-nationalist BJP, with many students joining the BJP’s student wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Party.
Bora said that the collective action against the SIR was specifically to oppose “a targeted campaign to wipe out the votes and rights of those constituencies already at the margins of society,” like Muslims, Dalits, tribals, and women. But it was only the beginning of a harder, longer fight for systemic change, the activist added.
AISA, the CJP, and other activist groups have now announced a protest in Delhi on Oct 10 for Gyanesh Kumar’s resignation, SIR’s reversal and reinstatement of the voting rights of millions.
In a video on Instagram on Oct 8, Bora played with lines from Gorakh Pandey’s Hindi poem Unka Dar (Their Fear):
“They fear/that the defenseless and common people will stop fearing them.”
“Now, that day has come. We do not fear you.” - The Straits Times/ANN
