Neha Bora, national president of the All-India Students’ Association (AISA), has said that the resignation of Dharmendra Pradhan as Union Education Minister following the Jantar Mantar protests in Delhi is not enough “to win back our country”.

Attending public events in Kozhikode on Saturday (August 22, 2026), the student leader claimed that uprooting the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), “its root and its stem from Indian soil”, was a task still left to be done.

The Indian society must reject all forms of communal division, Ms. Bora said, while opening a gathering in the morning in memory of pro-Left cultural activist T.K. Haris. “We must fight within our own self to become a better society, to make space for women, for people from different marginalised gender identities, for linguistic minorities, and for regional minorities. The martyrs of our freedom struggle had constantly reasserted this. That is what nurtures the democratic soil of this country, with which the ideologies of the RSS and the BJP are completely incompatible,” she said.

Because of this reason, Ms. Bora said, they must be removed not just from power, but from the very essence of how society looked at itself. “It’s not just enough to defeat the BJP in elections. It is important to defeat them politically, at coffee table discussions, at dinner table discussions, at tea stores, in classrooms, on WhatsApp groups, on social media, through memes, through jokes, and through songs. We must create a country which cedes no space to the BJP and the RSS,” she said.

The AISA leader said what the BJP and the RSS had done to the country would not be forgotten. “We will not forget that they made enemies out of one another, out of common people of this country. We will not forget that they turned neighbours into enemies. We will not forget that friends and family members were estranged for long periods because of the hatred of their politics,” she alleged.

“If it is to be a true democracy, then the governments must shake in their boots at the prospect of a mass movement. They must shake in their boots if they cannot provide accountability to the common people and students and young people of this country. And that is perhaps what the Jantar Mantra movement achieved,” Ms. Bora said.

Meanwhile, speaking at a panel discussion at ‘Secular Fest’, an event organised by ‘Wake Up Keralam’ and Deseeya Manavika Vedi in the evening, she said an organised force such as the RSS and the BJP can only be defeated by “another organised force” with a clear political vision. She said that though the Cockroach Janata Party, the online collective which led the Jantar Mantar protests, was not at present thinking of launching an organisation, they would hopefully become part of a broader alliance against the Sangh Parivar politics.

Published - August 22, 2026 08:14 pm IST