Hyderabad: “To be truly in love with this country is to know how broken it is.”
Neha Bora, national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), said this on Sunday evening, August 16, to a venue so full that people had given up on seats. They stood along the walls, sat on the steps, filled the entry way. A few more stood outside the venue listening to a speaker they could not see.
The crowd cut across ages, from Gen Zs capturing the moment with their phones to men and women in their sixties and seventies sitting on chairs intently listening. The crowd was enthralled and charged up as Bora spoke.
Neha Bora was delivering the 15th Hasan Memorial Lecture, held at Lamakaan in Banjara Hills, titled “Young India speaks: Jantar Mantar and the way forward.” Sai Balaji, former Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students’ union president, also spoke.
A movement that first began in Hyderabad
Bora came to Hyderabad three weeks after the end of the NEET paper leak protest that consumed Delhi for seven weeks and cost then Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan his job. She spent 23 of those days on hunger strike at Jantar Mantar.
She began by turning towards the city she was speaking in. “You were protesting against our beatings on the streets of Hyderabad,” she said in appreciation, referring to July 20, when Delhi Police lathi-charged and tear-gassed student protesters heading towards Parliament.
Bora said the student movement she belongs to began with the death of Rohith Vemula, the Dalit research scholar at the University of Hyderabad (UoH) whose suicide in January 2016, after his suspension and the withdrawal of his fellowship, set off protests across Indian campuses. Ten years on, his struggle still shapes what student politics in this country looks like, she said.
She then went down a list of Hyderabad campuses that she said were “an inspiration.”
At NALSAR University of Law, students had objected to Chief Justice of India (CJI) Surya Kant being invited to their convocation. The Bar Council of India (BCI) responded on August 13 by freezing the enrolment of the entire 2026 graduating batch and directing the university to identify the students and faculty who had signed the representation. The freeze was reversed within hours, with BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra later apologising.
“The students did not back down even when the threat was to their careers,” Bora said.
She praised students at the UoH who fought what she called the injustice around their elected union, and students at Osmania University for continuing to insist on the right to protest.
“These are examples of how moral courage and resistance are alive,” she said.
‘How do they know what it is to take a country back?’
The second half of her lecture was an argument about who gets to define “patriotism.”
“To be patriotic is not to blindly celebrate the country,” she said. It is to understand its problems, what political decisions do to the people who live under them and who has paid for those decisions with their lives.
“Knowing that the state does not always love or protect you, and still choosing to protest, is true patriotism,” she said.
She named Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam, arrested in 2020 and prosecuted under the Unlawful Activities (Prevention) Act in the 2020 Delhi riots case; poet Varavara Rao and former Delhi University (DU) professor GN Saibaba, who died in October 2024, months after his acquittal, and Stan Swamy, the 84-year-old Jesuit priest who died in custody in July 2021 while awaiting bail in the Elgar Parishad case.
She called them political prisoners. “To ask for the repeal of colonial-era laws like the UAPA is being patriotic,” she said.
Bora spoke about the farmers who blocked highways for months against the controversial farm laws introduced by the Centre. “Fighting against hopelessness and injustice is itself an act of patriotism,” she said.
Students at JNU and Jamia Millia Islamia, and Muslims generally, had been called “ISIS agents” and student “terrorists,” she said. People who raised their voices had been called cockroaches.
“The country you (government) have destroyed is on one side, and we are on one side,” she said.
The men who wrote mercy petitions from prison (referring to Vinayak Damodar Savarkar) and who wrote against joining the freedom struggle, “How do these people know what it is to be patriotic?”
“When students and citizens were sitting in protest, fighting against injustice, how can they be told that they do not understand patriotism?” Bora asked. “What do those who condemn protesters know about the spirit of Bhagat Singh, who smiled while being hanged? Or of (freedom fighter) Ashfaqulla Khan?”
That spirit is Indian history, she said. It is not theirs to withhold.
“When people came together for the country and made the movement stronger, even (PM Narendra) Modi and (Amit) Shah had to bend,” she said.
Jantar Mantar was the beginning of end of fascism: Neha Bora
“When we faced lathi charges and tear gas and sat together at Jantar Mantar, people came from across India to strengthen the movement,” Bora said.
She said she is often asked what she wants the Jantar Mantar protest to be remembered as. Her answer was that she wants it remembered as the “beginning of the end, the generation that put an end to the politics of hate, the people who handed democracy back to the people.”
“Our wounds are not our own. Our pain was felt,” she said. “Thank you for your solidarity, and for showing how to stand for the country against fascist regimes.”
“We will be tested again and again, but we have the courage and strength to stand again and again,” the AISA president said.
“We are not afraid of lathis, tear gas and repression,” she said. “We will be remembered as the people who made history in this country. We will make a new India with this spirit.”
Balaji, speaking before her, said resistance movements usually start with a handful of people and grow in proportion to how widely oppression is felt. “The Jantar Mantar group grew because the oppression did,” he said.
“A paper leak is not a symptom,” he said. The real symptom, he argued, is a society that can no longer promise anyone a fair exam.
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