Express Interview | Student activist Neha Bora on ‘anti-national’ tag, Umar Khalid and whether she will fight polls

She also spoke about the politics of the ‘Azadi’ slogan, JNU’s changing political culture, the Left’s electoral decline, Naxalbari, and Umar Khalid.

There were reports of protesters in Jharkhand objecting to your presence. Why did you hold a march on August 7, when one was called on the 10th? 

It’s funny that the BJP-RSS has been completely absent from the protest that went around the country and, when Jharkhand students were sitting down to protest, they said, ‘Oh, today we have decided we are suddenly pro-student.’

But when I went to Ranchi, I received a warm welcome. People were smiling and shaking hands with me. When looked carefully, the video the RSS ecosystem is trying to run shows the media being asked to step down from the stage, not me. 

As for August 7, there were calls to hold the protest on August 6 or 8…but our call was given much before this; we were mobilising across Jharkhand.

And would you work with the CJP again?

CJP’s organisational understanding is evolving. Will we work with them? Of course, as long as they’re working for the people. Our political energies are concentrated on issues concerning students and young people.

Is there a problem in calling the Jantar Mantar protests a ‘leaderless’ movement? Are there any cons of it?

It’s not a problem if people say that we’ve not come here for an ideology or a leader. We’ve come here because the cause rings true with us. But to be able to say this is also politics.

Saying they have come to stand with the people, not a political party or leader, is a very political thing. It is one of the most political things to say.

Your loyalty is not divided by religion, caste or region. You are united on common agendas. To have an ideology, to have a politics, is to know your place in the world. It’s not to be somebody’s follower or have unquestionable loyalty. To know what stand you will take — that is politics.

Any cons to this articulation are that once protests end, people don’t really consolidate it in their heads.

People think of this as a unique moment in time where they were associated with it and this time will never come again, or confuse ‘politics’ with something negative due to the corruption they observe in their elected representatives. But what they were doing was politics. 

Was Jantar Mantar an evolved version of the previous movements like the anti-CAA or Farmers’ agitation, or was it different?

We don’t exist in a vacuum. All protests have a history, and mass movements take from previous movements. If we had not seen students lead mass movements in 2019, many of us might never have become student activists. The equal citizenship protests made it possible to imagine a united struggle. Likewise, the farmers’ movement also united people’s struggles. 

It was different in a way that the anti-CAA protests were labelled Muslim protests, farmers’ protests Khalistan. They tried it with this protest also. They called students sitting “terrorists”. Dharmendra Pradhan called us terrorists, Nitin Nabin called us “viruses”.

First they said nobody was coming. Then, “Oh, look, too many Muslim people.” Then, “Oh, look, they’re all anti-national.” “Oh, George Soros is funding them.” They tried a lot, but this time it did not work out.

Unemployment, no answer. Paper leaks, no answer. Decay in education, no answer. Instead, what do you get as a response? You get labels. You get state repression. People mobilised years of anger at the same playbook. And this time they refused to sit in silence in their homes or be afraid.

You’ve said you are open to contesting elections. How ambitious is your political imagination?

I am ambitious in my political imagination, but it is not limited to electoral ambitions. If elections are a way in which the party that I am associated with, CPI(ML) Liberation, sees we can expand our struggles on the ground, then that is the only way I will contest elections. There’s no other way.

Critics say student politics is a training ground for political careers, while the Left has lost electoral ground and resorted to mere student politics for sustenance. How do you respond?

There is such fetishisation of the individual in the way we see politics. We constantly talk about Kanhaiya Kumar. But the same people know Sucheta De, who was JNUSU president. Where is she? She is a trade union activist in the CPI(ML) Liberation. Those same people know Sandeep Saurav, a JNUSU office bearer, now a representative from CPI(ML) Liberation.

This fixation is selective. You want to talk about opportunists, but not student activists in trade unions and women’s organisations. Mesmerisation is also a problem, I know this comes from the intelligentsia also, because they love to find a pure leader behind whom they all can rally – they don’t exist. They don’t exist.

People will choose their own paths. People will choose to leave people’s movements and associate themselves with the bourgeois ruling party, or to even desert mass movements and associate themselves with the BJP. But people will constantly also dedicate their entire lives to this people’s movement.

We’ve done student politics since the 1990s. We were at the forefront of OBC reservations, JNU deprivation points, scholarships, FYUP (Four Year Undergraduate Degree), Occupy UGC, Nirbhaya, fee-hike, anti-CAA movements and even during the times when BJP-RSS carried out Rath Yatra. Some people discovering AISA in the last few months does not mean we have suddenly started work.

We consider electoral politics as a way of broadening organisation and mass movements. We will not just wait for the day you see the Left leading Parliament. We will actively contribute to building that, because Parliament is also a way the state is regulated. We want the people who are never represented, not even counted in statistics, to see representation in Parliament.

The ‘Azadi’ slogan became associated with JNU and the Left. Where do you stand on its use, and has JNU’s political culture changed?

‘Azadi’ was, first and foremost, a feminist slogan about women’s autonomy and freedom. It then transferred to other movements. But the right wing has spent a lot of cash associating stigma with it. 

Raising ‘Modi, Shah se aazadi’, ‘BJP se aazadi’, ‘paper leak se aazadi’, ‘corruption se aazadi’ slogans is not anti-national.

And there has been a systematic campaign against JNU. In 2016, they released the ‘Shutdown JNU’ campaign. Some non-students came inside (and) raised slogans, while others were arrested or videos were doctored… the democratic spaces JNU nurtured are being cut down. This campaign has been very ideological, and a lot of money, time, energy, and resources have been spent on it. 

So when during the protests at Jantar Mantar, people reclaimed that slogan, it was very refreshing in all manner and form. We are the people of this country and whatever slogans we reclaim for ourselves, for this country, are ours to reclaim. We make this nation.

What are AISA’s and your views on violent Naxalism, particularly given what has happened in recent months and over the past decades?

When the idea of Naxalbari has been constantly associated with something perverse, with something that is just violence against the idea of justice itself, I would say we should be careful in using this.

Naxalbari asserted that a vast majority does not have the basic right to the land they till.

Minimum wage, dignified treatment, recourse to law, the right to be seen as human beings — that was the Naxalbari movement.

It took different forms. In Bihar, it became an assertion of human dignity against feudal landlords. Mass violence and massacres of Dalit and Muslim villages cannot become common in Bihar. Nor can rape of women from Dalit “tolas” or Muslim “tolas” by dominant landlords.

At its core, the poorest of the poor cannot continue to be dehumanised.

Umar Khalid’s name was raised repeatedly during the protest. What is your view on that?

When people are talking about Umar today, they’re not talking about him because they really want to understand the demand for the release of political prisoners. They are doing it because there’s so much noise around, like “Umar Khalid ke supporter hain, to ink pheka jaa sakta hai”. To call somebody “anti-national” has become the easiest tool of those who have no reason, no critical thought, nothing to say and no politics to give.

During protests, there were no stage slogans other than education and paper leaks; we talked about releasing all political prisoners.

As students, even those who think Umar Khalid should be in jail should read up on it. Why don’t you figure it out? Why don’t you try and understand why a judiciary exists?

A judiciary exists to ensure that every citizen gets a fair trial and hearing, and that guilt is decided by proper legal procedure. No common citizen can be tried by the media or mobbed and declared convicted by a political group or the state.

So Umar Khalid is not a question of nationalist or anti-national. It’s a question of whether you stand with the legal procedure or not. It is a question of what kind of country we want to build.

I, my organisation and all of us associated with the student movement advocate the release of all political prisoners, including those leading the anti-CAA and equal citizenship movements, including Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam.

Interview by Syed Ilham Jafri for The Indian Express