“uth merii jaan mere saath hii chalnaa hai tujhe
qalb-e-mahoul mein larzaan sharar-e-jang hain aaj
hausley waqt ke aur ziist ke yakrang hain aaj
aabgiinon mein tapaan walwale-e- sang hain aaj
husn aur ishq ham aawaaz-o-humaahang hain aaj
jis mein jaltaa huun usi aag mein jalnaa hai tujhe
uth merii jaan mere saath hii chalnaa hai tujhe”
~Kaifi Azmi
(Aurat)
(Arise, my love, for now you must march with me
Flames of war are ablaze in our world today
Time and fate have the same aspirations today
Our tears will flow like hot lava today
Beauty and love have one life and one soul today
You must burn in the fire of freedom with me
Arise, my love, for now you must march with me)
A hunger strike is a language of last resort. It betrays the exhaustion of ordinary channels—petitions unread, protests ignored, conversations deferred. When a young researcher refuses food for weeks, risking organ failure and speaking through a body that has lost seven kilos, the act is both plea and indictment. Neha Bora’s fast at Jantar Mantar was precisely that: a public translation of a private breaking point, and in doing so it crystallised a wider crisis in Indian higher education.
From the classroom to the barricades
Neha Bora’s politics emerge from study as much as struggle. Raised partly in Siliguri and schooled at Delhi Public School, she went on to study sociology at Delhi University and pursue a postgraduate degree at Ambedkar University, Delhi—an institution framed around critical social thought. Today she is a third‑year PhD scholar at JNU’s School of Arts and Aesthetics, where her academic work engages cinema, theatre and performance. That disciplinary mix—sociology’s attention to structure, performance’s command of presence—shapes Bora’s public voice: concise, direct and theatrical without being performative.
Theatre taught her how to own a stage; sociology taught her the grammar of inequality. Together they produced an activist who refuses easy binaries. She is not merely a student leader spouting slogans; she is a researcher, an organiser and an orator who links the micro‑experiences of students to the macro‑operations of policy and power.
What the hunger strike revealed
The protest at Jantar Mantar that drew thousands began online—a satirical riposte called the “Cockroach Janata Party”—and then swelled into a national movement. Students converged on Delhi over paper leaks, cancelled exams, delayed schedules, and the cascading despair of unemployment and suicides. Their demands were simple: accountability for the examination failures, transparent processes, and the resignation of the Union Education Minister.
Bora, along with colleagues who included Manish Kumar, Aamin Amitoj and Sonam Wangchuk, took an indefinite hunger strike. As days passed without substantial government engagement, their bodies became the most visible index of administrative inertia. Doctors warned of organ damage and plummeting blood sugar; still she returned to the microphone at Jantar Mantar and spoke with the steadiness of someone who had long rehearsed grief and grievance into sentences that cut.
When the state answered not with dialogue but with force—reports of lathi‑charges, tear gas and injuries to female protesters—the hunger strike shifted into moral testimony. Bora’s words on stage were both accusation and archive: “Our injuries will bear witness to the violence,” she declared, invoking the bodies of students as living records of what had occurred. She also invoked a lineage of educational reformers—Savitribai Phule and Fatima Sheikh—placing the present struggle in a long fight to democratise learning.
Beyond a moment: what the movement demands
Bora insists the movement is bigger than any single person. Her framing is strategic: it converts individual anger into a public claim for institutional reform. The list of demands is straightforward—end paper leaks, fair examinations, punishment for the guilty, affordable higher education, dialogue with students, and accountability for state violence. Yet the simplicity of these demands masks a deeper critique: the commodification of education and the resulting exclusion of those who cannot buy their way into opportunity.
Her argument is not only about administrative competence. It is about the social cost of a system that forces families into debt, converts youth into perpetual exam‑takers, and treats academic futures as lottery tickets decided by leaked papers and opaque processes. For Bora, the right to education is inseparable from dignity, equality and democratic accountability.
A political moment shaped by youth
In conversations with established public figures—most notably on Kapil Sibal’s programme Central Hall—Bora spoke not as an isolated antagonist but as the representative of a generation. She emphasised that the rage on the streets is cumulative: paper leaks are not sudden phenomena; they are outcomes of a system that has long privileged private coaching and marketised credentials over substantive access. Her demand, therefore, is less theatrical than transactional: students want concrete reforms, not rhetorical sympathies.
Neha’s insistence that historical change is often led by youth is a familiar trope; its force here comes from the specificity of claims. This is not idealistic bravado but a call for institutional responsiveness. Students want a seat at the table where decisions about examinations, schedules and accountability are made. They seek secure, transparent processes that allow their years of preparation to count for something other than uncertainty and anxiety.
The paradox of visibility
Jantar Mantar has turned Bora into a national figure—someone whose name now signs petitions, anchors television debates and circulates across social feeds. This visibility, however, brings a paradox. When a student‑researcher becomes a public symbol, the personal and the political collide. Media attention can amplify demands, but it also risks flattening complex arguments into soundbites. Bora navigates this terrain by anchoring rhetoric in evidence: citing the human cost of cancelled exams, naming affected communities, and linking present events to historical struggles over access to education.
Her activism therefore performs two acts at once. It dramatizes the urgency of the present and historicises the problem, showing how contemporary administrative failures connect to deeper structures of exclusion—caste, class, gender and the commodification of knowledge.
Where will students seek justice?
At its core, Bora’s question is simple and urgent: where should a student go to seek justice? That question resonates because it touches democracy’s minimum promise: that institutions will protect basic rights and redress grievances. When the state appears indifferent and institutions lean toward privatization, the question becomes a test of civic architecture.
The broader lesson of the Jantar Mantar movement is that educational reform cannot be only technocratic. It must involve structural accountability, the enforcement of transparent practices, and a genuine opening of institutional deliberation to those most affected. If public education is to survive as a social common, its governance must be responsive, not defensive.
A continuing story
Neha Bora’s story is not a closed narrative of martyrdom or triumph. It is an ongoing account of a scholar‑activist whose trajectory—Siliguri to Delhi University, Ambedkar University to JNU—reflects both privilege and precarity. Her hunger strike was an extreme instrument born of extreme frustration; it made visible the costs borne by young people in a system that tolerates disorder and rewards gatekeeping.
Whether the movement secures immediate policy wins or incremental reforms, its value lies in naming failures and making them politically costly. Bora has given a moral vocabulary to those failures and turned private suffering into public claim-making. For now, her question—where should a student go to seek justice?—remains an open one that both the state and society must answer.
Would the government respond with meaningful reform, or will this become another moment in which students’ sacrifices are recorded only as footnotes? The fate of public education in India will be shaped by that answer—and by how seriously we take the witness of bodies like Neha Bora’s.
~Hasnain Naqvi is a former member of the history faculty at St. Xavier’s College, Mumbai….
The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author.
