'A Green Flag for the Train to Move': Neha Bora on Why the GenZ movement isn't here to stop

U: Good morning, everyone. One of the leading names in what we call the Gen Z movement is here to join us in Kolkata today. As the entire movement across Jantar Mantar today moves beyond the question of paper leaks and examination irregularities, we join Neha Bora to talk about her experiences, activism and politics, and walk us through her own journey. Welcome, Neha!

N: Thank you.

U: So, first of all, it’s nice meeting you. It’s very nice—it's a pleasure to meet you.

N: Same here.

U: In one of the very interesting conversations that you have had in recent times, you spoke about how the books that you read, the kind of plays that you were a part of in your college theatre, and all those experiences shaped your political imagination to some extent—to a huge extent, rather. Could you share with us a few, or any specific play or book, that just stayed with you for a long time and is still playing a huge role in making you think about politics?

N: I think the thing about books is that if you have favourites, you want to read them again and again. And after a certain point of time, no matter how much you like a book, you forget some things about it, and then you read a new book, and that book becomes your favourite.

U: Right.

N: So, at different points in time, I’ve really enjoyed different books.

U: Right.

N: And so, I think, when you ask me today what books are shaping me today, they’ll be very different from what shaped me before. So, right now, I was reading The Brothers Karamazov before all of this happened.

U: Okay.

N: I was reading—and that is a very good book. It’s a very good book. I just finished Unequal, and that is why, when you listen to my interviews, you will constantly see me referring to that book—

U: Exactly.

N: —because I have just finished that book! I was just finishing Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America. And because its preface and its other [sections] lead you into different other galleries, right?

U: Absolutely, yeah.

N: So, Galeano’s text on what the role of an artist is in bringing resistance, or upholding or speaking truth to power, that is very good. I think I like poetry a lot, so I read a lot of poetry from time to time. So, I think, because I was reading about Latin America, I was reading some Latin American poets. I was reading Paash once again because I had to go to Punjab in between. I was trying to read poets from Tamil literature or Kannada literature because I have to travel there also.

U: Yeah, that gives you a separate context as well.

N: Yeah. I mean, it makes—if you’re going—we don’t exist in abstraction, right? We exist as part of history.

U: Absolutely.

N: And so, if I’m going to meet students in Bengal, if I’m going to meet students elsewhere, I think it helps us understand a little about the language that they use, the stories that they hold dear, the stories that they grow up with. So, yeah, all of that.

U: Yeah. The beauty of language, again.

N: Yeah, definitely.

U: So, Neha, after the twenty-three-day strike that you undertook, how, in your own introspection, do you feel it is going to be remembered? Like, do you feel at any point—we have a lot of people referring to the strike undertaken by Kazi Nazrul Islam in Bengal or Bhagat Singh—how do you think history is going to remember this one strike?

N: I don’t know how history is going to remember this, but I’ve said this when someone asked me, “How do you want it to be remembered?” and I’ve continuously said that I want this to be remembered as a movement which began and, I don’t know, signalled—was the green flag that you put in front of a train before it starts moving, right?

So, this is the green flag that’s going to make this train move, that is responsible for the decline of the kind of politics that we’re seeing today—the politics of the BJP and the RSS.

U: Correct.

N: I hope that’s how it’s remembered, because that’s how it goes down in history, I hope.

U: Now, the fact that you brought up the BJP and RSS, and the fact that the primary demands were met with the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan, who was, again, we know, of a certain ideology coming from the RSS and everything. Our current Education Minister is also a very active member of the RSS. So, do you feel anything, for that matter, has actually fundamentally changed in that way?

N: I think the movements that we undertake and the victories that we register don’t always look like what they appear on the face of it. So, even though he’s been replaced by Pralhad Joshi, who openly justified the release of Bilkis Bano’s rapists, he is an RSS member. Even though he’s been replaced by someone like that, when we sat down on a hunger strike and we said that we wanted his resignation, we knew—मतलब, there is a sher, no?

“Har shakhs pe ullu baitha hai, anjame gulistan kya hoga?”

We were not—I mean, we were not mistaken that some person who’s actually concerned about, or knows anything about how to fix the education system of our country, or wishes to fix the education system of the country, would come to power.

But it was important for two reasons. Dharmendra Pradhan’s resignation was important for two reasons. One was that, at the present juncture, all democratic institutions are being bulldozed. And what lies at the heart of democracy? So, when we say that one person, one vote, and everybody’s vote has equal weightage, when we say that, we’re not really talking about just the electoral system. What we’re talking about is—and why democracy has so much legitimacy—is because this fundamental aspect, which is at the core of a democratic setup, means that everybody will be equal in a democracy. This idea is where democracies draw their legitimacy from.

But right now, there is an attack on that. In West Bengal, we saw an extensive SIR campaign undertaken. We saw how different sections of society are being relegated to second-class citizens, being denied basic rights, their houses being bulldozed, their basic human rights being denied. So, a massive campaign is going on not just in Bengal, but throughout the country—a campaign of excessive privatisation of our education sector, our healthcare sector. All public infrastructure is being privatised, and hence the crisis of unemployment, hence the crisis in education, which wishes to render it not just a right of the people of this country, but a commodity that can be sold in the market.

So, when this is happening, it is important that when this idea is being attacked, you have a movement which says that even if you are loyal to the RSS, even if you’re loyal to the BJP, you cannot remain in power if you do not serve the people of this country.

U: Yes.

N: So, this—when in 2015 Rajnath Singh declared that, you know, “There are no resignations in the NDA, and we do not resign,” he was not saying that, “We don’t resign and that we are, you know, so powerful.” He was essentially saying that, “We don’t care about democratic accountability. We only care about democracy for as long as we can draw our legitimacy from it. We can draw the legitimacy of whatever we do and justify it by saying that we have a democratic mandate. But we don’t really care about what is at the core of a democratic setup, which is accountability of people’s representatives.”

So, it was important that people who are sitting in the Cabinet, people who come to power through the vote of the common people, are answerable and that they have a fear. They have a genuine fear that no amount of affiliation and service to the RSS and BJP alone can keep them in power if the people want their resignation. One, that was one thing.

And the second thing was that it was important because it broke away from this idea that whatever is happening to our country cannot be resisted. We can fight, we can languish in jails, we can be charged under UAPA, we can see extreme state repression and we can be silenced into a corner, or we can be silenced into a jail, or we can be silenced into submission, but a victory is not possible.

This kind of common understanding had prevailed in the country. But, I mean, that’s not to say that there weren’t courageous fights by different sections of the people. There were many courageous battles that the people have waged in this country, and that is what has inspired this movement as well.

But it was important for this victory to be registered so that we could say that there are other victories which can also be registered, just if we are united, just if we stand in solidarity with one another and reject the divisive politics that is at large in the country.

U: Correct. Like, being realistic at the same time is again one of the major attributes, I would say, of the Gen Z protest.

N: Yeah.

U: Not having very unrealistic expectations. So, as a student activist who has been here for quite some time, what are the elements that you personally feel you’ve noticed differently within the Gen Z movement, within this section of the youth, that were very much distinguishable, in a way, from the previous protests, like the ones that we saw in Shaheen Bagh, for that matter? What was different here? Because, of course, social media, for sure. But what else did you find?

N: No, I think, at the core of all protests is this deep sense that you have been wronged, that what is happening should not be allowed to continue. And that takes on different forms. It took on a different form during the Equal Citizenship protests. It took on a different form during the Farmers’ protests. It took on a different form during the RG Kar protests.

U: Yes.

N: So, it has taken on different forms. But what was specific about the form that it took in this movement was the sheer ridiculousness and the satire that was deployed to counter people in power.

And I think—there is a phrase, no? You say you give someone a dressing-down.

U: Yes.

N: I think the young people of this country gave people who prided themselves, or who were so proud and so arrogant that they remained untouched by every mass movement, by any form of criticism—all of those people got a dressing-down.

And it was not specifically angry or, you know, vengeful. It was humour, it was satire, it was jokes, it was memes through which the Prime Minister, the Home Minister and the Education Minister got a dressing-down.

And this image that they had built of themselves—whenever you look at the narrative that they build for themselves, you see a larger-than-life image. Be it that of a Vishwaguru, or fifty-six-inch ka seena, non-biological—all of that elevates these people and their coming to power into something Godly, into something that should not be questioned, into something that is untouched by us, lowly citizens.

But this movement challenged that. This movement not only touched their arrogance and, you know, their sense of self-esteem, but it gave them a thorough dressing-down.

And the Prime Minister had to come to Instagram, the Home Minister pulled a disappearing act in Parliament, and the Education Minister, who was labelling us terrorists, has been ousted from power. And it is a moment of great possibility for all of us to write our country anew, to write our future and what it will be from the beginning.

U: Yeah. But the fact that you spoke about the kind of attributes that Gen Z has in these protests, but again, primarily, this specific protest was built on youth mobilisation, as we all know, right? But for this protest to sustain for a long time, do you feel—or rather, I would frame it as, how do you feel AISA, as a student union, can help in shaping the political direction of this movement?

N: No, I think all of us have a very big part to play because it’s not a small thing that, you know, young people, students sat down in different parts of the country, including Kolkata, and could win the resignation of an Education Minister who was one of the most central cogs in the machine of the BJP, right?

So, if this historic thing has happened, the next step is that we move towards another historic thing. And that is why I say that this moment is full of possibilities. Whatever we have learned in the past decade and more, it’s a moment for us to unlearn that.

For us as—I mean, specifically because we’re talking about Gen Z, we have grown up—I mean, when we gained any form of societal consciousness, we gained it after a change and breakaway in national politics and the way society was oriented, right?

So, we grew up in this society where you could not question power. If you questioned power, even if it was a simple social media post on perhaps Facebook or Instagram, you could be pulled up by the police and taken to, I don’t know, jail. You could be taken to the police station.

It was a system where it had become a common thing that you could prepare for years and years on end, your family could pool all of its financial resources, but you could not be sure whether the result that you got after an examination was actually a result which was fair, or whether it had come out of a corruption that had not been exposed as a paper leak yet.

You were not sure that if you exited higher education with a PhD or an MA from a reputed central university or a state university like JNU, Jadavpur or Calcutta University, your higher education meant that you had a secure future. It meant that even if you got a job, you did not perhaps have job security.

It meant that you could and would be looked upon as separate from the majority based on your caste, based on your religion, based on your gender, based on the language you speak.

I mean, in Delhi, we saw this a lot. There was mass eviction of Bengali-speaking working-class people throughout slums in Delhi and across different parts of the country. It was Delhi from where working-class people were picked up and thrown into the waters, saying, “You don’t belong to this country.”

So, this understanding of the fact that people in power have absolute control over the relationships that will exist amidst people in a society—they have absolute power over what you will speak, what you will not speak, what you have a right to say, what you don’t have a right to say, what kind of personal relationships you can form and with whom, when you go to a school or a university, what you should wear, what you should not wear, what you will be taught, how much fees you will pay, what your parents will have an immediate anxiety about with regard to your education, and then once you enter higher education, or if you will even enter higher education at all, or if you’re in a government school, the mid-day meals that are being served—what will be served in them?

If you go to higher education universities, whether your university will look at education as a fundamental right of the common people or whether it’ll be sold through FDI or through a privatisation of public institutions, like what we are witnessing right now in ISI.

So, all of that changed our definitions of justice and injustice, our definitions of what citizenship looks like, our definition of what dissent is in a democracy, our definition of what peaceful, respectful disagreement should look like. Everything has changed.

And that is why it is important that this is what student organisations who understand that our society is changing—it has changed to a large extent at a fundamental level. It is student organisations like AISA who come, not just based on an agenda, but have a deep understanding of the people that we work—the universities that we work inside, the colleges that we work inside.

We have a deep understanding of those colleges, those universities and the societies that we inhabit. So, with the burden of, I don’t know, knowledge, you also have a burden of perhaps intervention. You have a burden that if you understand that this is all happening around you, you have a burden—or not a burden, a responsibility, actually.

It’s not a burden; it’s a matter of great pride that we bear this responsibility that has been shouldered by many before us and who inspire us.

So, it is our responsibility to intervene in society, and I think, as AISA and as other student organisations, specifically those which associate themselves with the progressive Left movements, we have a responsibility to speak in clear terms about what is happening with us and to make all possible attempts to unlearn whatever has been taught to us, to change this fundamental understanding of how a society looks at itself and its members.

U: So, it was very nice talking to you about your entire journey and all your opinions. So, this was basically Neha Bora walking us through her journey of activism and politics. Today, again, is her first day in Kolkata. So, we’re going to welcome her, of course, and it was really nice speaking to you, Neha.

N: Same here. Nice meeting you.

U: Thank you so much.