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

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.

“Can we please, please call Neha the Goddess of Democracy,” asked Nishita Nath, a 24-year-old student in the capital, sitting under a tree in central Delhi earlier this month. 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.

‘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.

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.

Breaking with her family – and a motherly massage

Bora was born in Khatima, a small town in the northern Indian state of Uttarakhand. The family then lived in Jammu, Bengaluru, Amritsar, and Lucknow as her father’s service in the Indian Army frequently took them from one posting to another.

As a teenager, differences in political opinions with the family grew, to a point where Bora was “cut off”. Then, a few months ago, Bora staged a 23-day hunger strike in solidarity with the students at the Jantar Mantar protest strip.

Bora recalled being surprised when someone among the thousands-strong crowd said: “A woman is there, saying she is your mother; shall I let her in?” A motherly leg massage followed.

That hunger strike also helped establish her on a national level, where people could finally engage with her left politics, said N Sai Balaji, a senior AISA leader, who advises Bora closely.

“India’s aspirational class, who felt betrayed by the government’s broken promises, found hope in people like Neha who were sitting selflessly. That’s where the whole propaganda vanishes. Suddenly, the so-called ‘anti-nationals’ become humans too,” Balaji told Al Jazeera, referring to a term often used by Modi government supporters for critics.

From university campus to streets

The cameras on Bora are new, but the activism and talent for political mobilisation are not.

In 2019, protests against proposed amendments to India’s citizenship laws, which were seen as discriminatory against Muslims, were a true political awakening, Bora told Al Jazeera.

That kickstarted Bora’s participation and eventual leadership of students-led movements. At JNU, Bora “distributed pamphlets and mobilised students for years, canvassing students’ votes for AISA, going to room to room”, Ali said.

Bora lives and breathes politics, “speaking out for Muslim political prisoners”, for instance, he added, referring to youth leaders like Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, who have now been in jail for more than six years without a trial. Bora, he said, is “bravely honest”.

And nimble.

The October 10 episode, when Bora evaded the police, was no one-off. Multiple smaller coups followed that week, as Bora outmanoeuvred government forces to stage demonstrations with supporters in parts of central Delhi.

Then Bora’s photos and videos would flood social media by evening: Straining against the officers’ grip, yet smiling for the cameras, flashing a victory sign, fighting to break free, often hoisted in the air by policewomen.

Bora listens to ghazals by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the celebrated Pakistani vocalist who brought Sufi music to a global audience.

But the young left leader is a good singer too, say friends, and plays the tambourine.

And unlike many others from that political ideology in previous generations who have been criticised for being too dogmatic and theoretical in their use of Marxism, Bora is the new generation student, Balaji points out, “who grew up on the internet and knows that language [to engage with youth] very well”.

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.

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.”