New Delhi, India – As India’s leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, marched with tens of thousands of supporters to the country’s Supreme Court on October 12 to submit a petition seeking the sacking of the nation’s election chief, he rested his hands on the shoulders of two women ahead. One was his 54-year-old younger sister Priyanka, whom Rahul – two years older – has described as his “best friend” and most trusted lieutenant. The other was a 29-year-old student leader who few knew outside college politics until these past few months: Neha Bora.
After 12 years in power, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has recently faced a number of his toughest political challenges, as a Gen Z-led movement first forced him to dump his education minister after a series of examination scandals and is now pressuring him over controversial changes to India’s electoral rolls that have stripped 130 million people of the right to vote. Yet while the satirical Cockroach group that drove mass protests at Jantar Mantar in the heart of the capital New Delhi over the last few months has grabbed more global headlines, Bora, from a left student group, has rapidly emerged as one of the most defiant faces of a generation that is challenging Modi’s grip on power. Bora is slight of build, with dark hair, and speaks in a deep, resonant voice.
But where Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) leaders have sat in for protests, held placards, and quickly been picked up by police, Bora has made almost a game out of tricking security forces out to get protesters – using street politics tactics that have turned the student into a cult figure among sections of the country’s youth unhappy with Modi’s policies and appointees. Software developers have turned Bora into video-game characters, leaping over barricades, collecting “democracy” points and dodging police in Mario-style games. Social media users edit and share Bora’s quick-paced fan edits, confronting police personnel, shared by tens of thousands and viewed by millions.
And veteran opposition leaders like Gandhi lean on the student leader – literally – in tense situations. The reference was to Hong Kong protest leader Agnes Chow, who earned that epithet as she campaigned against laws that critics have called draconian, imposed by Beijing on the Chinese territory. Such comparisons, though, are the last thing Bora wants – as a leader of a protest movement seeking to cut a political demigod down to size.
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.
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