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AISA national president Neha Bora and actor Kishore slammed the Karnataka government at a youth and student seminar in Bengaluru over an FIR registered against an unidentified woman for displaying posters supporting jailed activists Umar Khalid and Sharjeel Imam. The speakers questioned why the state police were policing placards even as the Congress claimed solidarity with student protests.
The event was held in Bengaluru on Sunday, August 23 as part of the Gen Z Rising campaign by the All India Students Association (AISA), the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation [CPI(ML) Liberation], to carry forward the student mobilisation from the Jantar Mantar protests in Delhi.
Neha accused the Congress-led Karnataka government of hypocrisy for extending solidarity to the Jantar Mantar protests in Delhi while allowing an FIR to be filed over posters supporting Umar Khalid at Freedom Park. Neha also took aim at political parties that position themselves as opponents of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), saying they must move beyond symbolic solidarity and demonstrate what genuinely pro-student politics looks like. Referring to Karnataka's BJP-RSS (Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh) support base, she said parties that treated students and young people in the same way as the BJP could expect to face the same rejection from them.
Extending solidarity from Bengaluru to student movements in Andhra Pradesh and Kerala, Neha said the fear generated among the BJP-led Union government by the protests was not enough. “What will be enough is when this government and the BJP-RSS system would have been uprooted from the soil of this country. Only then must we rest,” she said.
The FIR being referenced was registered by Upparpet police on July 24 against an unidentified young woman who had displayed placards reading "Umar Khalid Zindabad", "Sharjeel Imam Zindabad" and "Ukhaad Le BLR Police" during a protest in Freedom Park. The protest, organised by the Karnataka Vidyarthi Sanghatane and attended by AISA and the Students' Federation of India, among others, had been called to condemn the lathi charge on students in Delhi and demand the resignation of Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan.
Police said the woman was also seen carrying a placard reading "My Poster, My Rules" and another expressing support for the transgender community. After reviewing CCTV footage, police booked her under Section 192 of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita for "wantonly giving provocation with intent to cause riot", alleging she had "deliberately displayed provocative placards with the intention of inciting unrest and disturbing public peace".
Kishore, addressing the FIR directly, cited the 12th-century Vachana movement in Karnataka to argue that real solidarity comes from acknowledging difference rather than pretending it does not exist. Describing himself as "an aware citizen" rather than a politician or activist, he warned against movements erasing memory to appear more broadly acceptable, saying that unity built by leaving out caste, religious or gender history was avoidance rather than unity.
He pointed to the state's own discomfort with invoking Umar Khalid's name or the slogan "azadi", including objections within the student movement itself, and asked why remembering a student and political prisoner who fought the same system should be treated as a threat rather than an act of solidarity. He closed by invoking BR Ambedkar's warning that those who forget history cannot make it.
Neha also condemned Azim Premji University's administration for suspending students and filing an FIR against them over an on-campus reading circle, calling it at odds with the university's liberal image.
Neha further spoke about the two days following her and fellow AISA leaders Manish and Aameen's breaking of a 22-day hunger strike at Jantar Mantar. She said security forces fired tear gas at the protest site days later, forcing them to vacate it, and that when she returned to Jantar Mantar after a hospital stay, she found the mood among protesters transformed. She said the anger that met her that day was rooted not only in the police crackdown of July 20, but also in years of accumulated grievance, from the deaths of NEET aspirants to the hardships of demonetisation and the pandemic-era migrant worker crisis.
She traced the GenZ Rising campaign's route through the country over the preceding weeks, starting in Jharkhand, where students on hunger strike won the cancellation of the JSSC-CGL and JSSC-CJA examinations, and Kolkata, where protests led to a stay on the ISI Bill threatening the Indian Statistical Institute's autonomy. In Hyderabad, she said, students on their fourth day of a hunger strike were protesting the influence of the ABVP student union and the breakdown in scholarship disbursal at their university.
She also cited the Mega DSC-2025 recruitment scandal in Andhra Pradesh, in which candidates have alleged paper leaks and irregular Sports Quota appointments across more than 16,000 teaching posts after the state government altered the eligibility rules just before the recruitment notification.
She recalled meeting activists in Chennai fighting NEET in the name of Anitha, the Dalit student from Ariyalur who died by suicide in 2017 after failing to secure a medical seat despite topping her state board exams. She also spoke of Anagha Sasi, a Dalit research scholar on indefinite protest at Thunchath Ezhuthachan Malayalam University in Kerala, who has alleged caste-based discrimination and sabotage of her research by her faculty guide.
Carnatic musician TM Krishna spoke about the Constitution as a document meant to be lived rather than only read, saying that Indian society had failed to let its spirit take root in people's everyday lives.
He argued that the BJP and the RSS understood culture as the real terrain of politics, shaping how children are raised and what they are taught, which was why he believed the response to it also had to be cultural rather than only electoral.
Krishna also argued that centralised examinations such as NEET were fundamentally incompatible with a federal democracy, since they privilege students with resources while shutting out those from smaller towns and villages.
Speaking as someone from Tamil Nadu, where opposition to NEET has been sharpest, he was blunt about where he stood on the exam, stating, “NEET — any kind of idea that a centralised examination is a way that you allow people to educate themselves is fundamentally flawed."
He also criticised recent amendments to the Right to Information Act and digital regulations, saying they had eroded the accountability the RTI Act was meant to guarantee, and credited the student protests of the past few months with restoring what he called "creativity" to Indian politics.
Tulsidas R, an advocate from Bantwal who coordinates RYA's state-level coordination committee in Karnataka, spoke about the state's long history of Dalit protest movements and linked it to the unemployment crisis.
A joint resolution on the state's education and employment crisis, released by AISA and RYA, was passed by the gathering. The resolution calls for an end to the closure and merger of government schools in Karnataka; a state education policy centred on public education and social justice; the passing and implementation of the Rohith Vemula Act; and an independent probe into irregularities at the Karnataka Public Service Commission. It also demands that the NTA's centralised examination model be scrapped in favour of a decentralised system, that the National Education Policy 2020 be rejected, and that gender and internal complaints committees be constituted in every university under the UGC's 2026 equality regulations.
This story was written by a student interning with TNM.
