Neha, a prominent face of the CJP protests, presses on with hunger strike
As the Cockroach Janta Party (CJP) began its current protest at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar on June 20, at the height of Delhi’s difficult summer, the focus was mostly on the party’s founder, Abhijeet Dipke, who had become an online sensation by then.
As the sun set, Delhi Police began clearing people away from Jantar Mantar and the protest was reduced to a small group of people gathered at and around the main stage. But a lesser-known face standing just to Mr. Dipke’s left, with an “AISA” badge pinned to his kurta, continued to chant louder than most of the others. It was Miss Neha.
Ms. Neha, who was hardly familiar at the time, at least to the rest of the country, has since become the prominent face of the protest.
As the protest progressed, Ms. Neha, 29, who is the national president of the All India Students’ Association (AISA), the student wing of CPI(ML) Liberation, went on an indefinite hunger strike along with five other AISA members on June 28, the same day as activist Sonam Wangchuk.
Over the next three weeks, three of her colleagues abandoned their hunger strike due to health issues, and Mr. Wangchuk was forcibly removed from the protest site on the morning of Saturday, July 18, 2026, and Ms. Neha and her two colleagues continued their hunger strike for the 22nd day on Sunday, July 19. The three people, who now have the support of others to march, are staying in a makeshift tent near the protest’s main stage.
She is the only woman who continues her hunger strike on its 22nd day.
While 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 completed her education in different parts of the country as her father was serving in the army.
Coming from a non-political background, he moved to Delhi to pursue his undergraduate studies at Delhi University. Here he became politically active through a theater group. “The good thing about theater is that it explains everything, the politics in the languages we speak, the songs we sing, our body language,” he said.
Ms. Neha continued to be a part of the theater group ‘Sangwari’, which had many members from AISA, and also became active in student politics. Dr. BR continued his student politics during his Masters program at Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD) and now during his PhD at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU).
He was active in the anti-CAA (Citizenship Amendment Act) protests in Delhi and also the farmers’ protests in 2020-21, his colleagues said. Ms. Neha was elected secretary of AISA’s Delhi unit in 2021 and national president of AISA in December 2024.
“What sets him apart from others in AISA is that he is very charismatic and also connects with people very easily. I’m not saying others in AISA can’t do that, but someone else might get nervous talking about a topic that is infuriating. But he knows how to present it and adjust his tone of voice, when to emphasize and where to stop. Maybe that comes from theater, but it helps him get the message across better,” said an AISA activist.
Meanwhile, 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 the paper leaks and even went on a hunger strike then.
“But we were detained by the police as we were leaving the metro station to march to Parliament,” said an AISA member.
Fighting against the ‘politics of hate’
When asked about AISA’s association with CJP during the ongoing protest, Ms. Neha said: Hindu He said that they have been building this movement for a long time. “Left-wing student organizations in particular, together with AISA, built this movement from scratch, step by step, through memorandums and protests over the years,” he said.
“So when something like CJP comes along, it’s great for us. It’s great for students. It’s great for us as a student organization to have such a huge outpouring of support for CJP, and our involvement in it was an inevitable continuation of our fight for a better education system… Even the founder of CJP says ‘we were in the right place at the right time’,” he said.
Ms. Neha said all the BJP did was “politics of hate”. “And for us, it’s to influence people’s conscience, to make people realize that coming together makes anything possible, to make people remember that this is our legacy, not the divisive policies that the BJP taught us and trained us to do. That’s important for us. That’s what we’re going to learn from here. That’s what we’re going to build on from now on. And that’s why we fight every fight.”
It was published – 19 July 2026 23:24 IST
