SP students’ wing bags 4 of 5 seats

ALLAHABAD: Samajwadi Chatra Sabha (SCS), the student wing of Samajwadi Party, swept the Allahabad University Student Union (AUSU) polls, winning four of five posts in the election.

While the SCS bagged the posts of president, vice-president, joint secretary and cultural secretary, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) could only wrest the post of general secretary. The ABVP is the student wing of the RSS-BJP.

SCS candidate Awanish Kumar Yadav defeated his nearest rival Mrityunjay Rao Parmar, an independent candidate, by 552 votes to win the post of president. Yadav polled 3,226 votes while Parmar got 2,674. ABVP’S Priyanka Singh stood a distant third with 1,588 votes.

In an apparent dig at UP chief minister Yogi Adityanath, Yadav undertook a ‘purification’ ritual after his victory, getting ‘gangajal’ sprinkled in the president’s office. He claimed a similar act by the CM ‘inspired’ him to do so.

For the vice-president’s post, SCS’S Chandrasekhar Chaudhary beat his ABVP rival Shivam Kumar Tiwari by 72 votes. Vijay Singh Baghel of the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of the Congress party, stood third.

Since the restoration of the student union at the university in 2012, SCS has dominated AUSU polls. It won in 2012, 2014 and even in 2015 when it supported independent candidate Richa Singh, who went on to become the first woman president of AUSU since Independence.