Left Alliance Bags All Four Central Panel Posts in JNU Student Union Election
New Delhi: The ‘Left Unity’ alliance won all four posts in the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Student Union's central panel on Thursday (November 6), reasserting the Left's dominance of student politics at the institute and depriving the right-wing of any presence on the four-member panel.
Aditi Mishra was elected president, K. Gopika Babu the vice president, Sunil Yadav the general secretary and Danish Ali the joint secretary.
Elections to the student union's central panel and to the posts of councillors were conducted on Wednesday. Some 67% of the 9,043 eligible students had voted, reported PTI.
Unlike the previous student union elections held in April, which saw a split among leftist groups, the ‘Left Unity’ alliance this year comprised the All India Students' Association, the Students' Federation of India and the Democratic Students' Front.
Also unlike the April elections, in which the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) that is associated with the Hindu nationalist Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh won the joint secretary's post, the right-wing could not send any student leaders to the central panel, although some of its candidates lost to the Left by thin margins.
Having won 1,915 votes Yadav defeated the ABVP's Rajeshwar Dubey by just 74 votes, while Ali with 1,991 votes prevailed over the ABVP's Anuj Damara by a margin of 229 votes, Deccan Herald reported.
President-elect Mishra secured 1,861 votes as compared to her ABVP rival Vikas Patel's 1,447 and Babu trounced the right-wing student outfit's Tanya Kumari by 1,236 votes, having won 2,966 votes compared to the latter's 1,730, per the newspaper.
Meanwhile, the Congress's National Students' Union of India was routed in the election.
The SFI in a statement on Thursday said that the election outcome “is not merely a numerical victory but a political statement against the politics of hatred, communal polarisation and saffronisation”.
Speaking to PTI, the DSF's Yadav said that the “biggest issue” on campus has been “fund cuts”.
“The biggest issue on the campus is the funding cut. Since the BJP brought the National Education Policy … many public universities are being pushed towards privatisation, which is why the funds are being decreased every year. So, our first fight is to bring funds from the government for the campus,” he was quoted as saying.
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