'Why Are Our Best Students Dying?'

Poor families, she said, cut corners on their own needs to pay for coaching and fees, and when their child clears JEE, it's the happiest day the family has had in years.
So why, she asked, her voice already starting to climb, does the same system that we're told is the best in the country keep pushing those very students toward what she called 'institutional deaths'?

After every couple of minutes, she kept her left hand pressed against her hip, like she was fatigued and holding herself up. Every time she said 'Inquilab Zindabad, Lal Salaam, Jai Bhim' her right fist shot into the air, closer to her forehead in her typical trademark style very different from student activists that have shone and risen from student politics by chanting the same slogans.

For someone who had just come off a 23-day hunger strike and had been crisscrossing the country ever since, Neha Bora, national president of the All India Students Association, did not look like a woman who was tired of talking. She looked like she was just getting warmed up.

The event was called 'Dil Se Bol: Mumbai with Gen Z' -- an evening that packed in Shabana Azmi, filmmaker Dibakar Banerjee, Varun Grover, Abish Mathew and Raghu Ram, NCP (SP) spokesperson Anish Gawande, Rhiya Ahir, a Yalgar performance by a troupe of singers like Pravin Khade's from Jalna and Siddharth Baviskar from Kandivali, north west Mumbai, and a short play on Savitribai and Jyotiba Phule that ended with a line the crowd of around 500 didn't seem to expect -- that the Phules' work of educating the poor and the marginalised was, as the actor put it, the greatest love story India has ever known.

It was a warm, crowded room full of Gen Z kids sitting next to uncles and aunties who'd probably grown up on a very different kind of politics. And then Neha Bora walked up, and the lit the Y B Chavan Centre auditorium in Nariman Point, south Mumbai, with fire.

She opened, oddly enough, not with anger but with a small idea: The kind she then spent 30 minutes proving with everything that followed.

Activists understand, she said, that a struggle fought by ordinary people is never really its own, private struggle. Even if it's happening in one college, one university, one village or one small town, it belongs to everyone. She said she was there on behalf of the All India Students' Association (AISA), and on her own behalf, to say exactly that to Mumbai.

Why do the suicides keep clustering around students from marginalised castes and marginalised genders?

She didn't start with Delhi. She started with a question aimed straight at the city she was standing in -- at IIT Bombay, and at every IIT in the country.

Poor families, she said, cut corners on their own needs to pay for coaching and fees, and when their child clears JEE, it's the happiest day the family has had in years. So why, she asked, her voice already starting to climb, does the same system that we're told is the best in the country keep pushing those very students toward what she called 'institutional deaths'?

Why do the suicides keep clustering around students from marginalised castes and marginalised genders?

It's a question that has, unfortunately, gotten sharper in the days before Bora's speech and has gained mainstream media's attention only now.

Just last week, a 31-year-old MSc Physics student at IIT Delhi walked into the lecture hall complex on a Saturday morning, took the lift to the sixth floor, and jumped.

It was the second suspected student suicide on that campus since June 2023, when a 20-year-old first-year BTech student had died at his apartment inside the institute. Police say no note was found; the institute has said it is checking counselling records.

Nobody can say yet exactly why a bright young researcher chose to end things that way, and it would be wrong to guess. But the fact that it happened again, at the same campus, within months, is exactly the pattern Bora was talking about on that Mumbai stage -- the sense that something in these institutions keeps failing students and keeps failing them the same way beginning with Rohith Vemula in 2016.

She said she'd been asked, by a journalist in Bangalore the day before, what single moment from Jantar Mantar she thought she'd never forget. There were too many moments to count, she said. But one kept coming back to her.

'Why did you fire tear gas shells at them? Why did you use lathis against them?'

Before she got to that moment, she paused to talk about the students who'd travelled from Mumbai itself. Everywhere she went, she said, students came up and told her, 'we were there too, on the 20th, we were also injured.'

That's how she knew, she said, that Mumbai had stood shoulder to shoulder with Delhi. Whenever anyone tried to split the movement along caste, religion, language or region, students like these pushed back and said the blood spilled that day wasn't Delhi's blood alone -- it belonged to every ordinary Indian.

Then came the moment itself -- two days after July 20, when a call had gone out for students to march to Parliament, and two lakh to three lakh people had turned up in Delhi.

She, along with fellow hunger-strikers Ameen and Manish, had just broken their 23-day fast that morning. They were too weak to walk, so they stayed back at the tent, planning to head to hospital once the crowd thinned out.

Instead, she said, every five or ten minutes, small groups of students started coming back -- sometimes three, sometimes five, sometimes ten at a time -- bloodied, some limping, some being half-carried by others.

Each time, she said, she and her companions wanted to run out and help. The doctor looking after the hunger-strikers physically stopped them. Then, she said, police fired tear gas inside Jantar Mantar itself, at people who hadn't even set off toward Parliament, who were simply sitting where they'd been sitting for over three weeks.

"The people sitting at Jantar Mantar were not going to Parliament," she said, her voice rising into that controlled, simmering anger she's become known for. "Why did you fire tear gas shells at them? Why did you use lathis against them?"

Three people barely off a 23-day fast were lathi-charged along with everyone else, she said, and eventually all the protesters were forced out so the area could be cleared. That night's press conference was held by three people running a fever, barely able to sit up straight.

It took her three days to get back to Jantar Mantar herself. And what she found there, she said, wasn't just anger about the baton charge. It was something older and much bigger.

When she went up on stage and said the Delhi police shouldn't be forgiven -- that a force whose job is to protect people cannot simply be excused for beating them -- the crowd's response, she said, made her feel that her own anger was small next to theirs.

People were no longer asking for Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation alone. They were shouting for Narendra Modi's resignation, and Amit Shah's -- asking Shah to step down from Parliament altogether because he oversees the police and security forces, she said.

And, tellingly, ordinary protesters were shouting these demands before anyone said them from the stage first. Nobody had to feed them the slogans.

A decade of names nobody's supposed to remember

What made the speech land, though, wasn't just Jantar Mantar. It was how far back Bora reached to explain why the anger there felt so much bigger than one bad day.

She went back to Rohith Vemula's death in 2016, and to the way, she said, the BJP government forced Rohith's mother, Radhika -- she referred to her as Radhika Amma -- to publicly prove her caste.

She talked about JNU students in 2016 and 2017 being called anti-national on prime-time television, with anchors she described as funded by the BJP and its allies running doctored videos and photographs as evidence.

She brought up 2019, and police walking into Jamia Millia's library while students sat there preparing for exams the next day, breaking their heads.

"Who gave you the permission to enter our university and beat us?" she asked, and the line landed hard in the room.

She talked about the anti-CAA and anti-NRC protests at Shaheen Bagh at length -- not just the Delhi sit-in but what she called the hundreds of Shaheen Baghs that sprang up across the country, women in their seventies sitting out in the cold to defend the Constitution, only to be told by ministers and television anchors that they'd been paid five hundred rupees a head to show up and protest.

She didn't skip demonetisation, which she said killed people standing in bank queues overnight, or the COVID lockdown, which sent migrant workers walking home on foot -- from Delhi to Bihar, Bihar to Mumbai, Mumbai to Karnataka and Gujarat, sleeping on railway tracks along the way, while the government insisted the death toll was under control and photographs proving otherwise were dismissed.

She brought up the farmers camped at Delhi's borders for over a year, more than 700 of whom died, she said, while being branded Khalistanis for asking to be heard.

And then the names, delivered almost like a roll call: Hany Babu, Sharjeel Imam, Stan Swamy -- professors and comrades, she said, who taught a generation how to see the world, locked up for years.

She said the country was being made to forget that it forced Stan Swamy, a man in his eighties, to die in custody. She spent the most time on Umar Khalid -- a man, she said, who spent his whole career trying to teach people that disagreeing with someone doesn't mean you have to disrespect them, and who was declared guilty by television anchors before any court ever ruled on him.

Even today, she said, when activists raise Khalid's release, people who "survive on your patronage" turn violent against them.

To that same list, she added something more recent: Gen Z factory workers in Gurgaon, Noida and Manesar, protesting for basic dignity at work, some jailed for months now under the National Security Act simply for being ordinary workers.

'You've earned our disrespect'

Every one of those names, she said, fed into the same anger that boiled over on July 20 -- anger she called "built upon a long history of violence," one the government had earned for itself.

"If today the youth of this country look at the BJP government with nothing but disrespect, it's because you've earned it," she said, and the room applauded loudly.

She widened the target to include what she called the Godi Media -- pliant television channels she said protesters were now driving out of every protest site in the country, and she said that too had been earned.

Then she moved into a list of what she framed as small, satisfying victories already on the board: Dharmendra Pradhan's resignation as education minister; RSS Sarsanghchalak Mohan Bhagwat having a dialogue with a Gen Z protester; and the prime minister putting out a 30-second reel.

"We feel proud when you tremble upon hearing the word Jai Bhim," she said. "I am afraid," she added -- and paused just long enough for a co-speaker on stage to answer her: "You should feel that fear."

She promised, on behalf of her generation, that they would be at the front of every people's movement to come, from every university, college, school and street, for years to come.

She ended by widening the lens even further, addressing what she called this history of repression, of imprisoned comrades, of ordinary people's sacrifices for democracy and Constitutional values, and said it was on that foundation that a new India would be built.

She spoke to Gen Alpha, Gen Z, Millennials and what she called 'Gen Boomers' in the same breath, saying that undoing a decade of manufactured hatred between castes and communities wasn't a job for one generation alone.

She described a solidarity she said the country was feeling right now -- one where nobody asked what caste or religion the person standing next to them belonged to, only whether they were willing to fight alongside you.

Every year ahead, she warned, would test that solidarity, trying to push people back toward being told Muslims are the enemy, Dalits are taking their seats, women belong behind four walls, tribals are anti-development, and the poor are nothing but pests.

The speech closed, as her speeches usually do now, with the old couplet penned by Bismil Azimabadi, popularly known as Ram Prasad Bismil -- 'Sarfaroshi Ki Tamanna Ab Hamare Dil Mein Hai' -- fist still in the air, hand still braced on her hip, looking less like someone wrapping up a speech and more like someone catching her breath before the next one.