AISA Activists End Hunger Strike After 23 Days: Amid Clamour of Cockroaches, AISA Quietly Holds Fort of Student Politics

I still remember the corridor outside the All India Students' Association (AISA) room in Jamia Millia Islamia, on evenings before a general body meeting, when pamphlets sat in stacks by the door and everyone lowered their voice without being told to. Someone always arrived early to sweep the floor before the discussion began, an unremarkable habit that told you everything about how the room understood discipline. That memory belongs to a version of student politics I no longer take part in, though it still guides how I read every protest I have covered since.I write this piece as a journalist, no longer as a member of AISA, an organisation I left over differences of my own. I remain indebted to it all the same, for it gave me my first class in political science and in democracy, and for a standard of seriousness I still measure other student groups against.Ken-Betwa to CJP Protests: What Remains of the Right to Dissent in India?The recent protest at Delhi's Jantar Mantar traces its origin to a remark by Chief Justice Surya Kant on 15 May, who was reported to have called some unemployed young people "cockroaches" and "parasites" of society, a comment unrelated to student politics at the time. Abhijeet Dipke, a political communications strategist who had earlier worked with the Aam Aadmi Party, turned the insult into a campaign within a day, posting a Google form and an Instagram graphic under the line Main Bhi Cockroach—I Too Am a Cockroach.The account gathered half a million followers within a day and ten million within four. The first in-person gathering followed on 6 June, when several hundred students turned up at Jantar Mantar wearing cockroach masks, carrying exam guides in one hand and national flags in the other.The sit-in proper began on 20 June, when the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) declined to leave once its permitted hours ended and the Delhi Police, after an initial attempt to clear the ground, withdrew instead. Eight days on, Sonam Wangchuk began his fast, demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over the NEET-UG paper leak and the failure of the National Testing Agency, which conducts the exam, to prevent it. AISA's three activists, Neha, Manish, and Aameen, joined Wangchuk's fast from that same day, 28 June, and settled under a tarpaulin at the edge of the ground while the crowd around them was still thin. That timing says something in itself. AISA did not wait for a movement to gather numbers before lending it cadre, it arrived while the outcome was still uncertain and the risk to its own members was highest.None of them asked for a spot on the main stage, where Wangchuk himself lay through his fast. They stayed at the edge of the camp and did not press for the attention their own strike could easily have claimed, a restraint I have come to expect from AISA and rarely see from newer, louder formations.I met the site on 16 July, the fast's 19th day, on an afternoon when the thermometer read 42 degrees, and the crowd numbered barely a handful of people. Volunteers moved between the tents with steel tumblers of ORS for anyone who looked unsteady, and by mid afternoon that included most of the camp.Wangchuk lay on a mattress raised slightly above the ground, a drip taped to one hand, taking nothing but water and, on his doctors' insistence, an occasional spoon of glucose solution. Anjali Chhabria, the psychiatrist tracking his health and the health of the fasting students from Mumbai, had already been issuing bulletins warning that Neha's readings were the most fragile of the three. AISA's comrades held their strike through all of it anyway, without a single one of them stepping back once the numbers around them thinned.Rovin, a Masters' student and one of the organisers coordinating AISA's hunger strike, told me the small numbers at any one hour did not decide whether the strike would continue. He spoke of a slow build in "consciousness among people," his words, even on days when the ground looked empty.He said AISA had begun with six students on hunger strike and now had three, and that the group was working toward a Parliament march planned for July 20. He did not explain what became of the other three, and I did not press him on it that afternoon.What struck me most, sitting with Rovin, was how little any of it seemed to be about AISA itself. He spoke of the exam scandal, of Wangchuk's health, of the march to come, and barely mentioned his own organisation's part in any of it. That is a rarer trait in Indian student politics than it ought to be.Will CJP Become a Political Party? What Are its AAP Links? Vijeta Dahiya AnswersAISA is not free-standing, it is the student wing of the CPI(ML) Liberation, and that parentage explains much of its temperament. The CPI(ML) traces back to the Naxalbari uprising of 1967 and was founded in 1969 on a commitment to apply Marxism-Leninism to Indian conditions, at first under Charu Mazumdar's line of annihilating individual class enemies.That line collapsed within a few years, and after Mazumdar's death in 1972 the party split into several factions. Vinod Mishra led one of them, based in the peasant movement of Bhojpur and Patna in Bihar, away from individual annihilation and toward patient mass organisation instead, a turn formalised in 1974 and carried forward until his death in 1998. It was a mature correction, made by a movement willing to admit its own early politics had failed, and it set the tone for everything the party built afterwards.AISA, founded in 1990, grew out of that reoriented politics, disciplined, cadre based and unwilling to trade its own analysis for a place in whichever coalition looked biggest that year. It is that same discipline, inherited from a party that once had to relearn patience the hard way, that I saw again under the tarpaulin at Jantar Mantar.The pattern at the CJP site repeated when I placed it beside AISA's part in protests from years I remember more directly, and each time the record reads better than the last. During the movement against the National Register of Citizens (NRC) and the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which ran through the winter of 2019 and into the spring of 2020 before the pandemic lockdown scattered it, AISA activists organised rotations for the sit-ins held largely at Shaheen Bagh and outside the Jamia Millia Islamia gate.They kept legal aid lines open for detained students after the police action on campus on 15 December 2019, and printed material long before television crews arrived. Shaheen Bagh itself ran for more than a hundred days, led mostly by women from the neighbourhood who had never taken part in a protest before, and AISA's cadre worked alongside them without trying to take over the platform those women had built for themselves, a choice that took more restraint than credit.During the farmers' movement against the three agriculture laws, passed in September 2020 and repealed only in November 2021 after the Prime Minister announced the withdrawal himself, AISA sent volunteers to the Delhi border points at Singhu, Tikri and Ghazipur to run langars and medical points. That work drew little press of its own, but it kept those camps fed and functioning through a winter and into the following one, a length of commitment few student groups anywhere sustained.Earlier than either of those two movements, in the days after the gang rape on a moving bus on 16 December 2012, that Delhi remembers as the Nirbhaya case, AISA cadre stood among the crowds that gathered at India Gate and Raisina Hill even as police turned water cannons and lathis on the protesters. They pressed then, as now, for a change in how the state treats women's safety rather than for a place on the podium, and some of that agitation later fed into the Justice Verma Committee's recommendations and the criminal law amendment that followed in 2013. Few organisations can point to four such moments spread over four decades and say their cadre showed up at the harder end of each one.Dear Cockroach Janta Party, Umar Khalid Is Exactly an Education IssueNone of this makes AISA a spotless case, and it is worth naming its two clearest limits plainly, since a piece that only praises an organisation is not one I would want to write. The first is a matter of judgment, and it goes back to 2011. When the Anna Hazare movement against corruption filled Ramlila Maidan with crowds far larger than the Left had drawn in a generation, AISA joined it. Many of us in the organisation believed, and I still believe, that the movement carried the backing of the Sangh Parivar and worked to destabilise the UPA government from the street rather than correct it from within. AISA's presence at Ramlila Maidan gave that effort a legitimacy the Sangh could not have produced on its own, and I count it as the one place where the organisation's usual carefulness failed it. It was among the questions on which I eventually left AISA myself.The second limit is structural rather than a single misjudgement. AISA's discipline has kept it a minority voice by choice, and that same choice has kept it confined mostly to a handful of campuses even four decades after its founding, without the kind of mass base its own patient theory of change was meant to build.Both limits are real, and neither erases what the organisation gets right more often than most of its peers. AISA has also, through those same decades, been an unusually effective training ground for leaders, and that record deserves its own honest account rather than a passing mention.Shehla Rashid became a national name as an AISA activist and JNUSU vice-president during the 2016 sedition case protests on campus, a stature she could not have built without the platform and the political education AISA gave her. She later left the organisation to found her own party with Shah Faesal, and, as per recent reports, has been seeking a ticket from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), a full U-turn from the politics she once argued for as a student leader. Mohit Pandey, another former JNUSU president who came up through AISA, moved the other way and went on to head the Congress's social media operation. Whatever one thinks of where each of them landed, both came out of an organisation that trained them to speak, to organise and to lead before either party found a use for them.Neha's face is now doing the work Shehla Rashid's once did, drawing cameras and public sympathy to a cause larger than her own body, and I say this without any reservation about her.Her grit through 19 days on a mattress under a tarpaulin has been unmatched by most student leaders I have watched over the years, and it marks her out as someone who could become a real asset to people's movements, and even to her own party's politics, long after this one protest ends.AISA's task, then, is not to worry about losing her but to build on what it has already given her, so that the same organisation that trained Neha to hold a fast for nineteen days also keeps her close once the wider political world starts noticing her, the way it noticed Shehla Rashid a decade ago. Training its leaders to hold ideology above power, on top of the discipline it already teaches so well, is the one remaining project that could turn Neha's example into the organisation's long term strength rather than another departure to mourn later.None of that history erases what I saw at Jantar Mantar. Neha, the most fragile of the three fasting AISA students by Dr Chhabria's own account, has already been warned she could slip into a coma. Her comrades have not asked the protest to turn toward their own health, even as their bodies carry the same risk Wangchuk's does.NEET Protest: The Cry of A Generation Asking to Be HeardWhatever I think of the choices AISA made in 2011, or the ceiling its own scale has put on its growth, I recognised something familiar and, on the whole, admirable in that tarpaulin, an instinct that once kept me up late in the corridor outside the AISA room, before I decided I could no longer stay. Neha's determination in that camp is proof the instinct still runs strong in people who never sat in that corridor with me, and that, more than any limit I have named here, is the part of this story worth remembering.(Asad Ashraf is an independent journalist and former student of Jamia Millia Islamia. This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author's own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them)

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Amid Clamour of Cockroaches, AISA Quietly Holds Fort of Student Politics

AISA has, through the decades, been an unusually effective training ground for leaders.

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