By Our Correspondent
NEW DELHI – Two Dalit Ph.D. scholars are among the Leftist students who have swept the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union elections this year by winning all the top four seats. The JNUSU has historically been one of India’s most powerful and influential student bodies. These were the first JNUSU polls during the last four years. Polling was held on March 22 and the results were declared on March 24.
The United Left Panel retained its hold over the students’ union, clinching three posts out of four, while the fourth was won by a Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association (BAPSA) candidate backed by the Left alliance. A total of 7,751 students had registered to cast their vote this year. The four elected candidates took oath on March 26.
While Dhananjay of All India Students Association (AISA) was elected the president of the union, Avijit Ghosh was declared vice-president and Mohammed Sajid the joint secretary. Priyanshi Arya from BAPSA, supported by the Left, won the post of general secretary. The United Left had earlier fielded Swati Singh as a candidate for the general secretary’s post but her nomination was cancelled by the election committee hours before polling.
After this, the Left alliance called upon the students to vote for Priyanshi. The elections were held after a gap of four years, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and there was a considerable excitement among students and nominees with regard to the results, as the JNU has been facing the onslaught of RSS, BJP and rightist forces for quite some time. N. Sai Balaji was the last JNUSU president from AISA in 2018-19.
The BAPSA made inroads in the JNUSU’s top club with one of its candidates being elected to a crucial post. Of the total 5,656 votes, Dhananjay got 2,598. He beat Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad’s Umesh Chandra Ajmeera by 922 votes. For the post of vice-president, Avijit Ghosh from the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) stood the winner by securing 2,409 votes, defeating his competitor Deepika Sharma from the ABVP.
Dhananjay said after being elected that it was reassuring that the democracy of the JNU campus was intact. “Elections have taken place after four years on the campus. It is reassuring that the student community has shown that they have full faith in the Left,” he said. With 2,574 votes, Sajid won the post of joint secretary, defeating Govind Dangi from the ABVP with a margin of 508.
For the post of general secretary, Priyanshi stood the winner with 2,887 votes beating ABVP’s Arjun Anand by a margin of 926 votes. She is the sole woman to hold one of the four central panel positions, and the only candidate hailing from BAPSA this year.
Like most years in the recent past, this year also saw a straight contest between the Left and the ABVP. ABVP has emerged as the runner-up on all four posts, similar to the last election held in 2019. SFI has maintained a stronghold in the JNUSU polls for several years. However, when JNUSU elections were restarted in 2012 following the lifting of a ban by the Supreme Court, AISA emerged as the stronger Left force. And despite AISA and SFI forming an alliance in 2015, AISA has been fighting for the president’s post.
The Left panel has been winning all seats since 2016. Like in 2019, this year too, the Left students’ outfits formed an alliance of the AISA, SFI, DSF, and AISF to take on the right wing ABVP. The turnout for the elections this year stood at an all-time high with a jump of 5 percentage points, as 73% students turned out to vote this year as compared to 68% last time.
Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) president and Tamil Nadu Chief Minister M.K. Stalin has said that the JNUSU election results have signalled the downfall of right-wing fascist forces and that the people would unitedly reject the BJP in the Lok Sabha elections. In a social media post, Stalin congratulated the Left panel on their victory and said the ABVP’s violent tactics, and even cancelling that Left candidate Swati Singh’s nomination at the last minute, revealed their fear of defeat. “Despite their shameful actions, the JNU community has reaffirmed its rich tradition. This victory signals the downfall of right-wing fascist forces. The people of India will unitedly reject BJP in the Lok Sabha election,” he said.
The two Dalits among the winner are Dhananjay and Priyanshi, both of whom are Ph.D. scholars in the JNU. Priyanshi, the oldest of three daughters, hails from Uttarakhand’s Haldwani and is from a middle-class family. Her mother is a primary school teacher and her father is currently self-employed. Dhananjay hails from a middle-class family in Gaya and is the youngest of six siblings. His father is a retired policeman and his mother is a homemaker.
Priyanshi said she was treated differently in the society because of her caste when she grew up. “My father lost his job because he belonged to a lower caste. Such experiences have inspired me to do social work for the Bahujan community,” she said. A first-year Ph.D. student pursuing Philosophy at JNU, she did her Bachelor’s degree from Delhi University’s Indraprastha College for Women.
When she first set foot in JNU, the sense of finding a space for herself led her to join BAPSA. “It felt like home here… interacting with people in study circles who belong to the same marginalised community and sharing the same thoughts and problems as I do… I was never ambitious about entering student politics. I have always been adamant about speaking for my people and circumstances in my life pushed me to believe in the Ambedkarite ideology strongly,” Priyanshi said in a newspaper interview.
As general secretary, Priyanshi plans to first focus on bringing back an effective Gender Sensitisation Against Sexual Harassment on campus which has not been functional post the resumption of the university after the covid-induced lockdown. She said she wants to become a teacher and do social work for her people in Haldwani.
Priyanshi also said that the Left Panel had volunteered to extend support to BAPSA as their candidate’s nomination got cancelled and there was no other way to take down the ABVP. She also said it was unfair for the Left to take credit for BAPSA winning a post in the central panel.
Newly elected JNUSU president Dhananjay studied in Ranchi and did his Bachelor’s from Delhi University’s Aurobindo College, where he pursued Political Science, and his Masters from Ambedkar University Delhi (AUD). Currently, he is a first-year Ph.D. student pursuing theatre at JNU.
Like Priyanshi, Dhananjay also faced instances of caste discrimination which inspired him to raise his voice for the marginalised people. “There were several incidents when I came to Delhi too, where parents of my roommates would ask what caste I belonged to. At a very young age, I saw how my family was treated differently,” he said.
While Dhananjay never contested the Delhi University student union polls, he started his journey in student politics as a councillor at AUD. Explaining why he chose AISA, he said it is associated with the CPI-ML, which has a stronghold in Bihar. “When I came to Delhi and read across different party lines, I realised that AISA is very close to the ideology I believe in,” he said.
During his tenure as president, Dhanjay promised to take up the issues of increasing stipend amounts for student fellowships and the recruitment of single ideology-bearing faculty members. “A Dalit student, despite being hardworking and talented, is not being considered in interviews due to a single-ideology group of professors being appointed to the university. It is time we demand a change in this,” he said.
Explaining why the ABVP can never take over JNU, Dhananjay said the money and muscle power do not matter on the campus, where most students are from marginalised background. Students value their vote and choose a candidate for their ideas.
Aspiring to be a politician in future, Dhananjay is also interested in theatre. “Theatre has always been close to my heart. I was actively a part of it even during my DU days. Currently, I teach theatre to a few students twice a year,” he said. According to AISA, he is the first Dalit JNUSU president in the last two decades.
