The authorities think that they can beat dissenters into submission and bring them to their knees, All India Students Association (AISA) national president Neha Bora said in Kolkata at a convention of students from different academic institutions who protested against the crackdown on dissent on Monday (October 5, 2026). Participants called for action against Chief Election Commissioner Gyanesh Kumar over the recent ‘voter crisis’ in West Bengal and elsewhere in India.
The authorities wanted to silence the voices of students and the marginalised, which is why there were repeated attacks on multiple educational institutes. Mr.
“As students of art and cinema, we will continue to fight against every sense of oppression and fascism, and against every government that tries to promote fascism,” Blossom Hazarika, SRFTI student union president, said. They were now living in a state of fear, the attack on educational institutions was a repeated pattern undertaken by the current government, he said. Hazarika said. “You can attack our bodies, but you cannot attack our art and our imagination,” Subham, vice president of the SRFTI student union said.
“West Bengal has always defended itself and the entire country… It is now upon Bengal to defend not just itself but our country’s democracy,” Ms. The mandate that had brought the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) to power in West Bengal had proven to be a lie, and needed to be challenged, she added.
Bora said. People in power have been shown what it means to speak truth to power, and that in the coming days, even the highest authorities would be brought to justice and would lose their chairs when people come together to fight the wrongs, she said.
“They think they will rule Bengal with an iron hand; to do that, they designed something special and built the SIR [Special Intensive Revision]… The common people of the country have one power, it is the power to vote, but that has been stripped from us through a lie,” Ms. “They think they can beat us into submission and bring us to our knees with the use of brutal force. But they do not understand that we have come from the legacy of the Left and we have never been beaten into submission,” Ms.
Bora said. Throughout history, they (the Left) had always shown what people’s power can do, she said.
