United Left pips ABVP in JNU, the blip of a liberal oasis in Delhi

For the record, Dhananjay of AISA is president, Avijit Ghosh of SFI is vice president, Priyanshi Arya of Left-backed BAPSA is general secretary, and M Sajid of AISF is joint secretary.

The runners-up were ABVP candidates. The right-wing party created a flutter in the initial stages of the counting when its supporters took to social media to declare ABVP candidates were leading and, therefore, winning. That was not to be.

The alliance students called the victory a ‘routinised exercise’. The election result in 2019 was no different.

The Left has swept the polls more than two dozen times, the NSUI, backed by Congress, a few times, and the ABVP none.

However, changes are visible within this routinisation. A wide-eyed student entering the JNU campus in South Delhi for the first time hears anecdotes, not of the Left’s history, but the political churnings post-2014.

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Attempts to distort JNU’s image

They hear stories of how top ministers of the Modi government used unparliamentary epithets to describe JNU, how the street-level cadres called it anti-nationalist with ‘tukde tukde gang’ members as students, how the university was ‘tainted’ by the presence of ‘dangerous persons’ like former research scholar and current Tihar Jail resident without bail Umar Khalid, and so on.

The novice student is told how the top administrators of JNU were changed to implement drastic changes, including the short-lived decision to stop serving meat dishes in a canteen.

On a campus that claimed to breed humanism and spatial openness, Left-supporting students discovered new tag lines – commies, urban naxals or Khan Market gangs. Liberal was a pejorative word.

Right-wing activists saw problems with the university’s admissions procedure and reportedly suggested changes that should broaden new students’ social and demographic spectrum.

They also banded about the phrase, social engineering.

The 2024 results show the Left remaining victorious. However, the number of right-wing students has increased over the years, as evidenced by the voting patterns.

There was a time when the ABVP was a distant third. The Left constituents usually made the contest internal, with the NSUI often playing a role.

The Left is confident that as long as it is united in facing the ABVP, it cannot lose, and that held in this election.

That is the issue. The fact that the Left students organisations did not contest separately and needed to put up a united front against the ABVP tells a story with implications for the future.

Some analysts are quick to extrapolate these results to paint their picture of how the 2024 general election would look like. That will be a distorted picture.

There is no comparison between the two elections. In fact, Delhi’s small geographical area presents a diverse electoral picture.

The votes differ in JNU, the Delhi Assembly, and the seven Lok Sabha seats. One can spend a lifetime trying to understand trichotomy, but to no avail.

However, analyses necessitate comparisons to justify their presence. So be it. How the anti-ABVP ‘gang’ fought the campus poll is similar to what is happening in Kerala.

The united Left and the Congress may be part of the INDIA bloc but are contesting against each other.

In JNU, the united Left, the Congress-affiliated National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), and the Samajwadi Chatra Sangathan (SCS) fought one another.

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Challenges to the Left

If the dwindling vote share of the Left parties in the states, once Left bastions, is any indication, the students’ unions affiliated with them face a worrying future.

The nature of university politics in India closely resembles state or national politics. That leaves unaffiliated organisations with little breathing space.

One way to weaken the Left’s hold over the still-liberal JNU is to broaden the social base of the student intake or the right-wing ABVP by finding innovative methods of expanding its presence.

The Left’s weakness is neither ideological nor political. Like Narendra Modi’s BJP and the RSS, it has not been able to conquer, circumvent, or overcome the caste symmetry.

Even on results day, the JNU campus was busy understanding caste voting patterns. Social media knew the new president’s caste before knowing his name.

Today, the INDIA bloc is still to become a binding factor against the BJP for the general elections. And it may see the JNU results as a promising sign, a symptom of what ought to be.

For the Left student organizations, however, an introspection is in order. An alliance is prescriptive. Get used to it; it will give you results but slowly erase your identities.

Postscript: In Delhi, politics is never discussed without mentioning the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP). The Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Samiti (CYSS) is affiliated with Arvind Kejriwal’s party.

They haven’t yet severed the umbilical cord. The parent party’s hold over the students’ body is total.

Last September, the Samiti fared badly in the Panjab University Campus Students’ Council (PUCSC) polls. A strong push from AAP, which heads the Punjab government, did not help. The NSUI wrested the president’s post from CYSS.

The Samiti also considered contesting the Delhi University Students’ Unions last year.

It wanted a united fight against the ABVP, but NSUI was reportedly not agreeable to it. Eventually, the Samiti gave the elections a pass.

That raised some questions in Delhi. Did AAP think CYSS’s bad performance in DUSU would reflect badly on its government in Delhi?

Did AAP consider decimating Congress in Delhi a bigger priority? Or did it simply not want to divide the anti-ABVP votes in DUSU?