As the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) started its current protest at Jantar Mantar in New Delhi on June 20, at the peak of Delhi’s punishing summer, the focus was mostly on the founder of the party, Abhijeet Dipke, who had by then become an online sensation.
As the sun went down, the Delhi Police started removing people from Jantar Mantar, and the protest was reduced to a small band of people gathered on and around the main stage. But one lesser-known face, standing right next to Mr. Dipke on his left with an “AISA” badge pinned to her kurta, continued chanting slogans louder than most of the others. She was Ms. Neha.
Ms. Neha, who was back then not that familiar, at least to the rest of the nation, has since then become a prominent face of the protest.
As the protest progressed, 29-year-old Ms. Neha, who is the national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), the students wing of the CPI(ML) Liberation, began an indefinite hunger strike with five other AISA members on June 28, the same day as activist Sonam Wangchuk.
Over the next three weeks, three of her colleagues gave up the hunger strike due to health issues and Mr. Wangchuk was forcibly removed from the protest site on Saturday (July 18, 2026) morning, leaving Ms. Neha and two of her colleagues continuing the hunger strike for the 22nd day on Sunday (July 19). The three, who now take others’ support to walk, stay in a makeshift tent close to the main stage of the protest.
She is the only woman still continuing the hunger strike on its 22nd day.
Though such a long hunger strike is a first for Ms. Neha, she is not new to protests.
Army man’s daughter
Hailing from Uttarakhand, Ms. Neha did her schooling in different parts of the country as her father was serving in the Army.
Coming from a non-political background, she moved to Delhi to pursue her undergraduate degree from the University of Delhi. It was here that she became politically active through a theatre group. “Good thing about theatre is it tells you about politics in the languages that we speak, the songs that we sing, and our body language, everything,” she said.
Ms. Neha continued to be part of the theatre group ‘Sangwari’, which has a lot of members from AISA, and became active in student politics too. She continued student politics during her Masters’ programme from Dr. B.R. Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) and now during her PhD at the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
Her colleagues said that she was active in the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protests in Delhi and also the farmers’ protest in 2020-21. Ms. Neha was elected secretary of the Delhi unit of AISA in 2021 and national president of AISA in December 2024.
“What sets her apart from others in the AISA is that she is very charismatic and also connects with people very easily. I’m not saying that others in AISA can’t do it, but someone else may get agitated when they are talking about an issue that is infuriating. But she knows how to present it and how to modulate her tone, when to stress and where to stop. Maybe that comes from theatre, but that helps her to convey the message better,” an AISA activist said.
Incidentally, Ms. Neha and others had protested at the same Jantar Mantar in the summer of 2024 demanding the resignation of Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over paper leaks and they had even gone on a hunger strike then too.
“But we were detained by police as we were coming out of the Metro Station for a march to Parliament,” an AISA member said.
The fight against ‘politics of hatred’
When asked about AISA’s association with the CJP during the ongoing protest, Ms. Neha told The Hindu that they had been building this movement for a long time. “The student organisations, specifically of the Left, along with AISA, have built this movement from the ground up, bit by bit, through memorandums and protests over the years,” she said.
“So when something like the CJP comes up, it’s great for us. It’s great for the students. It’s great for us as a student organisation that there is such a massive outpouring of support to the CJP, and our involvement with it was an inevitable continuation of our fight for a better education system… Even the founder of the CJP also says ‘we were there at the right place at the right time’,” she said.
Ms. Neha said that all the BJP had done was “politics of hatred”. “And for us, influencing the conscience of the people, people realising that coming together makes everything possible, making people remember that this is our legacy and not the divisive politics that the BJP has taught us and trained us to do. That is important for us. That is the learning we take from here. That is what we will build upon from this moment on. And that is why we fight every fight.”
Published – July 19, 2026 11:24 pm IST
