The protest on Saturday (October 10) in the national capital calling for the resignation of Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar will be led by the Cockroach Janta Party, a social media satire page turned pressure group, and several left-wing student organisations. This comes on the back of a recent investigation of The Indian Express, which showed that Kumar’s fellow two Election Commissioners had raised many red flags on the ongoing Special Intensive Revision of electoral rolls.Right from the time of activist Sonam Wangchuk’s hunger strike at New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar in June-July for the resignation of then Union Education Minister Dharmendra Pradhan over paper leaks and alleged exam irregularities, the All India Students Association (AISA) also began a hunger strike close by. Gradually, the ongoing Left-backed countrywide agitation has seen AISA — electorally a marginal force in most campuses — and particularly its national president, Neha Bora, attract increasing traction on social media.We explain how AISA emerged from the several splinter groups of the Indian communist movement, its ideological beliefs, and its presence in educational campuses.A student organisation born in 1990 out of the several splinter groups of Indian communist organisations over the decades, AISA is the student wing of the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation, or CPI(ML)L. The CPI(ML)L is a splinter group of the CPI(ML) that led the naxalite movement in West Bengal decades ago.The Communist Party of India was formed in 1925. Its student organisation, the AISF, was formed in 1936. The CPI split in 1964, and the CPI (Marxist), or CPI(M), came into existence. Its student wing, the Students’ Federation of India (SFI), was formed in 1970.In the late 1960s, the CPI(M) had come to power in West Bengal, heading a coalition. Rebel cadres of the party, led by Charu Mazumdar and Kanu Sanyal, launched a peasant uprising after a tribal youth in Naxalbari village named Bimal Kissan, who had a judicial order to plough his land, was attacked by the local landlord’s men.“What started as a local incident soon triggered a chain of events that led to the formation of the CPI(ML) under the ideological leadership of Charu Mazumdar in May 1969. With the help of organisers like Kanu Sanyal and Jangal Santhal, the so-called Naxal movement rapidly spread to rural parts of West Bengal, Bihar and Andhra Pradesh, and there was also an intense urban guerilla struggle in the city of Kolkata,” writes Shivaji Mukherjee in The Oxford Handbook of India’s National Security.Story continues below this ad Rebel cadres of the CPI(M), led by Charu Mazumdar (L) and Kanu Sanyal (R), launched a peasant uprising after a tribal youth in West Bengal’s Naxalbari village was attacked.The movement was met with a stiff government crackdown: it was curbed in 72 days, after the killing of a policeman and nine tribal people. The repression continued in the early 1970s. In the book After The Revolution, political scientist Partha Chatterjee writes: “Several hundreds were killed by the police in fake encounters and thousands were put in prison.” Mazumdar was arrested by the police in 1972, and died in Alipore jail. A few years later, there was a further splintering of the movement owing to ideological differences. There emerged four main factions in the 1970s: Dakshin Desh, which went on to become the MCC in 1975; the People’s War Group (PWG); the Party Unity; and the CPI(ML)L.The first three decided to stick to armed struggle and remained on the Maoist path, aiming at an armed seizure of the Indian State by first forming base areas in villages, expanding the base to encircle the cities, and finally capture the cities.The CPI(ML)L took to organising mass peasant movements, abjuring the path of armed struggle and class annihilation in 1977.Story continues below this adGopal Pradhan, AISA’s first presidential candidate in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) students’ union elections in 1991, says there was a “rectification” attempt within the CPI(ML)L when it saw that it could not have any impact at the time of the JP movement in the mid-1970s and realised that building a mass organisation was important.In 1982, it decided to contest elections under the banner of Indian People’s Front and in 1989, it won its first electoral victory from Bihar’s Ara, with Rameshwar Prasad becoming its first MP. Today, the party is a constituent of the INDIA bloc in Bihar. Since its formation in 1990, AISA has emerged as a major student force in JNU and some other campuses. Gopal Pradhan told The Indian Express that left-wing organisations like Progressive Students Organisation (PSO) in Uttar Pradesh, All Bengal Student Association in Bengal, and All Bihar Student Union in Bihar merged to form AISA. He says that Akhilendra Pratap Singh of the PSO had become the president of Allahabad University student union in 1983. Also read | ‘Left doesn’t fear or sell out’: Neha Bora says right-wing outfits threatening secular views at educational institutesAccording to Pradhan, the demolition of Ayodhya’s Babri mosque in December 1992 — at a time when the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations had also been announced — gave an impetus to AISA in campuses across north India, as social justice and anti-Hindutva votes converged towards it in elections to students’ unions.Story continues below this adHe added that at the time, Allahabad (now Prayagraj) was a hub of civil service exam aspirants but its student politics was steeped in crime. “So, students inclined to studies shifted in large numbers towards AISA,” Pradhan recalls.In 1993, Anand Pradhan (currently a professor at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication) won the post of president as an AISA candidate in Banaras Hindu University. Other AISA candidates such as Lal Bahadur Singh in Allahabad University, Girija Pathak in Kumaon University, and Pranay Kishna Srivastava in JNU also prevailed that year.In Allahabad University, it also won the vice-president post in 2012 and 2013.What are AISA’s core beliefs? “Over the years, AISA has emerged as a popular left students’ organization struggling against the anti-student, anti-people right-wing organizations like NSUI (National Students’ Union of India, affiliated to the Congress) and ABVP (Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, the students wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh), exposing at the same time opportunist and semi-anarchist trends in the Left democratic movement,” AISA’s website says.Story continues below this adIt adds: “AISA commits itself to stand against the prevailing backwardness of our country and its dependence on external powers, which has provided a fertile ground for fundamentalism, medieval barbarism, casteism and communal frenzy, causing a gradual erosion of our national sovereignty and subjecting India to the threat of neocolonialism.”Also read | AISA national president Neha: ‘We’d exhausted all options; we thought let’s explore hunger strike too’In an attack on the BJP and the RSS, it says, “The alarming rise of communal fascism is not only a threat for our rich cultural legacy of communal harmony but has also posed a grave threat to nation building and the very foundations of democratic politics.” It adds that “religion is primarily an individual concern and should be completely separated from politics and from the institutions of governance”.“We struggle to carry forward the modern idea of secularism — ‘Sarva Dharma Varjate’ — as against the conventional notion of ‘Sarva Dharma Sambhav’,” it asserts.CPI(ML)L central committee member Sucheta De, who was JNU students’ union president from AISA in 2011-12, told The Indian Express that there were divergences between the SFI and AISA before 2014, but it would not be too meaningful to focus on them now. “Perhaps the only divergence is that we call the BJP fascist and they talk about neo-fascist tendencies in the BJP in their documents,” she said. In which campuses does AISA have a presence?Story continues below this adWhile SFI is strong in Kerala — and was once strong in Bengal — AISA has had a presence in campuses of north India. In JNU, for instance, 11 students’ union presidents since 2003 have been from AISA. Some of them such as Sandeep Singh, Akbar Chaudhary, and Mohit Pandey joined the Congress later. The former JNUSU president Chandrashekhar Prasad, who was killed in Siwan in 1997, was also from AISA.Another divergence is that AISA had had an OBC presence in Bihar, while the SFI leadership used to be largely “upper castes” from Kerala and Bengal until the CPI(M) was in power in both states. Being in power brought another divergence — the CPI(M) became an “establishment party” and also tried to acquire land for industry, while the CPI(ML)L has never been directly in power in a state, and is thus more “anti-establishment”.In 2025 and 2026, the presidential candidates of the AISA-SFI alliance in the Delhi University students’ union elections secured more than 5,000 votes, though this was far lower than the votes polled by candidates of the dominant ABVP and the NSUI.