Is Neha Bora, India’s new red star, Modi’s real Gen Z threat?

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‘Guerrilla tactics’

Bora has spent nearly a decade studying the arts at universities in Delhi, including as a postdoctoral theatre student at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), a premier public university that has been a cauldron of political activism for decades.

There, Bora joined the left student organisation, All India Students’ Association (AISA), which has been a major force at JNU for more than three decades.

Now the national president of AISA, Bora and comrades joined the Cockroach activists earlier this year in camping for weeks at Jantar Mantar seeking the resignation of the education minister, Dharmendra Pradhan.

But it was earlier this month that Bora moved from the sidelines to centre stage in the national consciousness.

On October 10, the Modi government locked down the heart of the capital New Delhi as thousands of young people prepared to protest, demanding the election chief’s resignation.

Police moved swiftly to detain protesters arriving by train and buses, confined student leaders to their homes, and even boarded a plane to detain top leaders of the Cockroach movement moments after the plane landed in the capital.

But Bora disappeared into the shadows, remaining beyond the police’s reach.

Then, that afternoon, Bora appeared live on Instagram, wearing a One Piece T-shirt – a symbol adopted by global Gen Z protest movements – and leading a crowd of a few hundred through affluent South Delhi, kilometres from the police barricades.

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In half an hour, the police chased down Bora, who was dragged away in a police van and released many hours later.

To understand Bora’s street politics, one needs to turn a few pages back. The AISA was founded in August 1990 as the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, a party that emerged from a Maoist-led communist rebellion that began in eastern India in 1967, inspired by a peasant uprising in the village of Naxalbari, West Bengal. The Maoists were called Naxals, after the village.

The party operated clandestinely in the face of state crackdown for at least three decades before rejecting armed violence – a number of its splinters, however, still seek a violent overthrow of the Indian state – and embracing parliamentary democracy in the 1990s.

But the party has changed, although it retains some of its legacy DNA. On October 10, AISA knew that the police would preemptively come after youth leaders. So its activists hid Bora.

“We have been an underground party before, before our party contested elections; so, we followed the same tactics, some kind of guerrilla [tactics],” said Danish Ali, a 25-year-old AISA student leader and a friend of Bora.

Ali said the party relies on tactics that “revolutionaries like Bhagat Singh” – an anti-colonial activist who was executed by British authorities in 1931, aged 23 – “used in resisting colonial rule.”

While Bhagat Singh, a self-described socialist in his time, remains a hero worshipped across political strains, Modi’s Hindu majoritarian Bharatiya Janata Party has demonised left politics. In parliament and state legislatures, too, left parties have in recent years suffered historic setbacks.

After protests won the resignation of Education Minister Pradhan, the prime minister cautioned in his Independence Day Speech in August against “urban naxals” or “intellectual naxals” – references that Modi’s party have used to describe opponents and critics of all political stripes.

There’s a reason, argues Bora, that Modi’s party is so scared of the left.

“How do you claim to be the champions of nationalism if you do not delegitimise the people who are actual inheritors of the radical legacy that got India independence?” Bora said, speaking to Al Jazeera.

Limitations of left politics in India

Still, despite Bora’s growing political stature, any left student leader faces a string of formidable challenges to leave a mark in Indian politics, analysts say.

First, AISA’s influence is concentrated in university campuses and pockets of student activism in northern India. Its parent party, the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, is also a small force in national politics.

The party has two members in parliament, both from the eastern state of Bihar, and has never governed a state on its own.

“AISA does not have a formidable bridge for its student leaders to transition from campus to constituencies,” said Asim Ali, a political analyst based in New Delhi.

In Indian electoral politics, a politician needs a geographical stronghold, Ali argued, where they have a reliable block of voters on the ground. “Bora does not have that kind of blocks or a base,” he added.

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One way into electoral politics for leaders like Bora is to transition into a mainstream political party with wider presence in India – such as Gandhi’s Congress party – like many left leaders have done. But there, different challenges exist. “Mere popular appeal doesn’t float you through entrenched hold of existing leaders in big parties like the Congress,” said the analyst.

Nonetheless, whether Bora stays with her left-aligned party or moves closer to groups like the Congress, “Neha appears to be rising above nuances of political cleavages – and building a real block of young voters behind her, even if it is not a textbook voter bank in the Indian context,” Ali, the analyst, said.

Among them is Nath, the Delhi University student who isn’t a member of AISA but is a staunch Bora supporter. She often ends up chasing the student leader on streets amid protests. Last week, Nath spent hours every morning running in her neighbourhood “to practice and keep up with Neha”.

“The way Neha speaks: The pauses, the tune in her voice, the flying hair. All I see on my Instagram is Neha,” Nath said. “My last week’s high point was when I held Neha’s hand while she was running in the chaos.”

That chaos likely isn’t going anywhere, with the Modi government facing pressure from the mainstream opposition, the Cockroach movement, and student groups.

Nor is Bora, says Ali, the political analyst.

Bora “is tapping a newfound place in Indian politics”, he said. “Neha is not a moment, for sure, but is here to stay.”