‘It is the mind that keeps you going’
She is 29 years old. She led a 23-day hunger strike that brought down a cabinet minister. She danced when it was over. She is still asking for more.
American Kahani News Desk
On the twenty-first day of her hunger strike at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, Neha Bora’s blood was being taken three and four times a day. Her blood sugar levels had dropped to dangerous points. Doctors monitored her continuously. The 29-year-old had begun the fast at 66 kilograms (145 pounds). By the time she ended it, she had lost significant body weight.
She was asked later, by openDemocracy, what sustained her through those three weeks. Her answer was characteristically precise — the answer of a theatre and performance studies scholar in JNU, Delhi, who understands that the body is, in the most political sense, a text.
“It was not so much about the body as it was about the mind. The body adapts, but the body sometimes tells you that it has had enough, and what is the point? It is the mind that keeps you going,” she said. “We read about bio-politics, about how an individual is reduced to their bodies. So that’s what happened to us.”
The remark captures something essential about Neha Bora — the way she moves, without self-consciousness, between the language of academic theory and the language of physical experience, between the seminar room and the protest ground, as if the distance between them has never struck her as particularly significant.
Her 23-day hunger strike gave her national visibility. Subsequent appearances and lectures/interactions in Jharkhand, Kolkata, Hyderabad, Andhra Pradesh, Nagpur, Jaipur and Mumbai, among other cities, have broadened that profile. It is in this context that some admirers have begun drawing a comparison between Bora and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the American progressive politician popularly known as AOC. Extremely popular and respected for her radical socialist views, she is being widely reported as a potential Democratic presidential candidate in the next polls in the US.
The comparison should not be taken literally: Bora is a student leader and activist, not an elected legislator, and India’s political and institutional landscape is very different from that of the United States. But the analogy captures something real about her emergence — a young woman with an ability to turn complicated political grievances into accessible language, command a crowd without sounding like a conventional politician, and use the energy of a younger generation to challenge established political assumptions.
The comparison with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is therefore less about ideology than political style. Ocasio-Cortez’s initial breakthrough came partly from her ability to speak in an idiom that did not resemble conventional congressional language. She could take policy questions and translate them into moral and personal questions about ordinary people’s lives.
Bora’s emerging appeal works in a comparable way.
She does not speak about examination irregularities merely as an administrative problem. She frames them through the aspirations and anxieties of young Indians who have spent years preparing for competitive examinations and see their futures tied to an unpredictable system.
She does not treat education policy as a technical subject. She presents education as a question of equality. At a recent Mumbai interaction organized by the Network of Women in Media, India, Bora argued that education is fundamental to reducing social disparities and criticized the growing role of privatization. EdexLive reported her contention that excluding large sections of society from education perpetuates inequality.
From Khatima to the National Stage: A Childhood in Transit
Neha Bora was born in Khatima — a small town in the Udham Singh Nagar district of Uttarakhand, in the lower Himalayas — to a family whose life was shaped by the Indian Army. Her father served as a soldier, which meant the family moved from posting to posting throughout her childhood, as Indian military families routinely do. She spent her formative school years in Siliguri, in the hills of north Bengal, attending Delhi Public School.
The Bengal years were politically formative in ways she has discussed publicly. She has spoken about encountering, during that period, the writings of Charu Majumdar — the Naxalite revolutionary who founded the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) in 1969, and led the historic peasant and students’ uprising in 1967 — alongside the poetry of Pablo Neruda and the essays of Arundhati Roy, as documented from her published interviews. The combination — an Indian revolutionary tradition, a Chilean communist poet, and one of India’s most prominent intellectuals — gives a precise map of the intellectual landscape she was navigating as a teenager in north Bengal.
She became AISA’s national president — an elected position representing thousands of student members across Indian universities — making her, at 29, among the most prominent Left student leaders in the country.
Her family’s political views, she has said, differ from her own. “She has said clearly that she stands firmly by her beliefs even when her family disagrees,” as BiographyKind documented. The sentence is understated but revealing: the daughter of an Indian Army soldier who has become the national president of a student organization affiliated with the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation has navigated a genuine ideological distance within her own household, and has done so without either hiding the distance or exploiting it for political effect.
After school, she came to Delhi for higher education. She studied sociology at the University of Delhi for her Bachelor’s degree — an academic choice that gave her, as BiographyKind noted, “a strong academic base for understanding social systems and power.” She completed her Master’s degree at Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University in Delhi. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in Theatre and Performance Studies, at the Jawaharlal Nehru University’s School of Arts and Aesthetics — one of India’s most intellectually vibrant, academically prestigious, progressive and politically engaged campuses and, in the current political climate, one of its most watched and hounded (by the ruling regime).
AISA and the Left Student Movement
The All India Students’ Association — AISA — is the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, one of the Naxal-origin parties that operates within India’s constitutional framework. It has been active on university campuses across India since the 1990s, focusing on issues of education access, campus democracy, caste discrimination, hate politics, and democratic rights.
Bora rose within AISA through a combination of campus organizing, theatre-based public communication, and a willingness to be physically present at protests that carried real personal risk — including a demonstration in Lakhimpur Kheri in October 2021, when BJP-connected individuals in a SUV allegedly ran over farmers and journalists who were protesting against the now-repealed farm law.
Her relationship with JNU is significant in this context. JNU has been a consistent target of the BJP government’s hostility, subjected to sedition charges against its students, funding cuts, and sustained attempts to delegitimize its academic culture. For a student in JNU, the personal risks of visible political activity are not theoretical.
(For instance, a highly popular student leader who has done his PhD from the Centre for Historical Studies in JNU, Umar Khalid, a brilliant scholar, is languishing in jail for six years, on what is widely believed to be cooked-up charges with fake evidence. So is another JNU PhD scholar, Sharjeel Imam, an outstanding student with an IIT background. It is also believed that they have been targeted and hounded because they are peaceful dissenters, modern, highly educated, brilliant – and Muslim. Seeking justice and freedom for Umar Khalid and others in jail, Neha Bora has consistently spoken out against their imprisonment without trail.) This paragraph has been added by the Independent Ink Copy Desk.
The Hunger Strike: 23 Days, a Cabinet Minister, and a Viral Dance
Bora joined the Jantar Mantar protests in mid-June 2026, when AISA committed its organizational resources to the Cockroach Janata Paarty-led agitation. Along with AISA comrades Danish Ali, Ameen Amitoj and Manish Kumar, and an independent protester identified as Hamad, she launched an indefinite and long hunger strike that would last 23 days — running parallel to, and outlasting, the hunger strike by renowned civil rights activist Sonam Wangchuk, who was forcibly hospitalized by Delhi police on his 21st day.
The physical toll was extensively documented by medical staff at the site and by journalists who covered the protest continuously. Her blood sugar levels dropped to dangerous points, requiring monitoring three and four times daily, as she told openDemocracy. She lost significant body weight over the three weeks. At several points, according to published accounts, her condition was described as being at high risk.
Three of the AISA fasters ended their strike on July 20, according to NPR, as the Sansad Chalo march to Parliament was being organized. Bora’s position during the strike’s final days became the subject of some dispute, which she addressed publicly after it ended. The march was attacked with unprecedented brutality by the Delhi Police, and even school girls were not spared. Pellet guns, lathis with nails and electric current, tear gas, and relentless brutality on peaceful protesters were recorded on videos and seen across the country leading to national outrage and international scrutiny.
The strike concluded on July 25, when Dharmendra Pradhan tendered his resignation as India’s Education Minister — the first ministerial resignation during the twelve years of BJP governance, attributed directly to sustained protest and pressure of tens of thousands of young protesters in Jantar Mantar, Delhi, and across cities and towns of India, such as Patna, Pune, Mumbai, Chandigarh, Bangalore, etc.
The celebration that followed became the subject of a controversy that Bora navigated with characteristic directness. A video of her dancing after Pradhan’s resignation went viral and divided the internet, as The Week documented. BJP leader and lawyer Mahesh Jethmalani criticized the celebrations. Others questioned whether someone who had claimed a 23-day hunger strike could dance with that energy. Bora addressed the contradiction publicly, defending her right to celebrate a victory she and her colleagues had earned.
The controversy is itself revealing about the specific expectations (typical of a certain feudal patriarchy) placed on women activists in India — that they must be perpetually suffering to be credible, that joy is suspect, that a body and being that was an instrument of political protest, cannot also be a body and being that dances and celebrates.
“We Want a Complete Rollback of NEP”
The hunger strike and Pradhan’s resignation were not, for Bora, a conclusion but a first instalment. In her interview with The Caravan’s Shahid Tantray — conducted during and after the hunger strike — she was explicit about the movement’s larger ambitions.
“What was your first reaction when you heard Dharmendra Pradhan resigned?” Tantray asked her.
Her response, as The Caravan documented, was to place the resignation in the context of the structural demands that remained unmet: a complete rollback of the National Education Policy, which the BJP government introduced in 2020 and which AISA and allied organizations have argued would privatize education, undermine access for lower-caste and lower-income students, and concentrate institutional power in ways that serve the ruling party’s ideological agenda.
CJP spokesperson Ashutosh Ranka confirmed the movement’s intention to continue, stating that the organization planned to engage with the government on structural changes rather than ending its campaign altogether. Bora’s own continued advocacy — for examination reforms, accountability, students’ welfare, and the broader education policy reversal — has given her public presence a continuity beyond the single dramatic episode of the hunger strike.
She has also spoken publicly about the imprisonment of Umar Khalid — the former JNU student leader who has spent six years in jail under India’s anti-terror laws for his alleged role in the 2020 Delhi riots — in an interview with Brut Media, which documented her views on Khalid, JNU, Left politics and electoral politics. An incident in Ranchi, where ink was thrown at her during a students’ protest, brought additional attention to her and to the case of the accused, who reportedly cited her alleged support for Umar Khalid. Bora addressed the incident and her position on Khalid publicly.
Theatre, Theory, and the Art of the Protest
What distinguishes Bora from many of her generation’s political figures is the integration of her academic and artistic practice with her political activism. She is not a politician who also studies theatre. She is a theatre and performance studies scholar whose understanding of the body, of public space, of spectacle and protest, directly informs how she shows up at Jantar Mantar.
“We read about bio-politics,” she told openDemocracy. The sentence locates her simultaneously inside the academic tradition — French philosopher Michel Foucault’s analysis of how power operates through the management and control of bodies.
Theory became experience. Experience became testimony.
She is 29 years old. She became one of the shinging stars of the huge Jantar Mantar protests. She led a 23-day hunger strike that brought down a cabinet minister. She danced when it was over. She is still asking for more.
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