The nursery of political luminaries
The Delhi University Students’ Union has been inextricably linked with national politics, with student leaders from various ideologies fighting for the seats on its prestigious panel
On August 10, 1942, during the Quit India movement, a vociferous gathering of students from Hindu College and Indraprastha (IP) College assembled outside St Stephen’s College, and urged Stephanians to join them in a procession to support the Congress leaders who had been jailed the previous day.
The group then marched down Alipur Road, passing IP College, whose authorities had shut the gates to prevent more girl students from joining in. But they resourcefully jumped the walls, helped by the protesters, and the procession continued down Chandni Chowk, shouting slogans, wrote the late Aparna Basu, who was a professor of history at the Delhi University, in her book University of Delhi (1922-1997).
Having been established in 1922, when India was waging a movement to gain Independence from British Colonial rule, Delhi University and its affiliate colleges were one of the centres of political activity in the Capital, with students and teachers often working in tandem with revolutionaries and participating in various activities launched by the leaders of the movement.
According to records available with the Delhi University, the senior superintendent of police of Delhi, in a confidential correspondence dated August 13, 1942, informed the city’s chief commissioner that students of Ramjas College were responsible for arson and sabotage, including the burning of an electric substation and uprooting of telephone and telegraph posts during a protest on Rohtak Road. The SSP suggested that the government grants to the college be “temporarily suspended”.
The students, Basu wrote in her book, had been clamouring for a union where they can come together and “organise extracurricular activities”. The process to fulfil the longstanding demand of students was initiated in 1947 during a general meeting held under the chairmanship of VKRV Rao (who was head of the DU economics department at the time) where a provisional committee consisting of presidents of all college unions was authorised to draft the Delhi University Students’ Union’s (DUSU) constitution and take steps necessary for its formation.
On April 9, 1949, DUSU was formed and inaugurated by then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, marking a “fulfilment of dreams and aspirations of hundreds of University students”, Basu noted.
Since then, DUSU has become a nursery of political leaders with student groups from various ideologies fighting for the seats on its prestigious panel.
DUSU leaders also participated actively in the Jaiprakash Narayan (JP) movement that began in Bihar in 1974, and launched protests against the imposition of Emergency in 1975 by then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.
The university also saw widespread protests over the implementation of the Mandal Commission recommendations for job reservations for backward castes by the government of then Prime Minister VP Singh. Rajiv Goswami, a commerce student at Deshbandhu College, attempted self-immolation against the move in September 1990, and went on to become the president of DUSU.
Election process
Until 1972, Delhi University followed an indirect form of elections under which affiliated colleges first elected 10 supreme councillors, who in turn elected the DUSU president and vice-president.
Former Union finance minister Arun Jaitley, then a student, played a crucial role in pushing election reforms in DUSU. Between 1972 and 1973, Jaitley, president of the students’ union at Shri Ram College of Commerce (SRCC) at the time, led the university’s longest students’ agitation, along with fellow Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) members in support of the reforms.
The strike continued for around 50 days, starting in November 1972 and going on till January 1973, said Sri Ram Khanna, then DUSU president and current professor at DU’s department of commerce.
Khanna, who was a student at SRCC, said: “DUSU supported the protest, and the university rusticated five students, including me, and it snowballed into a huge agitation. We called a strike and started a campaign. Even students from colleges not affiliated with DUSU joined. The university was shut sine die. In mid-January, the administration agreed to form a committee to look into the issues and agreed to allow all students to vote in DUSU polls.”
The ABVP won all the DUSU positions in 1973 — Alok Kumar, currently the international working president of the Vishwa Hindu Parishad (VHP), was elected president, and Jaitley became vice-president. He later became DUSU president in 1974.
Since then, students from 50-odd DU-affiliated colleges participate in DUSU elections annually. A large number of women’s colleges, such as Lady Shri Ram, Jesus and Mary, Gargi and Kamla Nehru, however, are still not a part of DUSU. Among the others not part of DUSU are St Stephen’s and Maharaja Agrasen college.
Poll campaigns: A mix of national and varsity issues
Former DUSU leaders say that national issues have always reverberated in the poll campaigns in the university’s elections. From the Emergency to the Bofors scandal, from the Mandal Commission to the sedition row in Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2016 to the Citizenship (Amendment) Act protests in 2019, these issues have been key to the discourse during polls.
Former Union minister Vijay Goel, also a former DUSU president, said he raised the issue of excesses during the Emergency imposed in his campaign in 1977. Goel, who was elected DUSU president that year, said, “I went to jail during the Emergency. No elections were held for two years due to the Emergency imposed by the then government. In 1977, all other political parties had supported one candidate against me.” Goel pursued a master’s in commerce from SRCC.
Former Union minister Ajay Maken, who was elected DUSU president in 1985, said that Rajiv Gandhi taking over as Prime Minister in 1984 played an important role in his election as DUSU president. “People, especially the youth, could connect with a young PM. It was the first time that NSUI (National Students Union of India) won the DUSU president’s post after the election process was reformed in 1973,” he said.
For senior BJP leader Ashish Sood, who was DUSU president in 1989 and a student at Sri Aurobindo College, Bofors became the biggest poll rallying point. “We made Bofors an election issue apart from common concerns of students. The time was such that students connected with the issue,” he said.
Congress leader Alka Lamba, a former Aam Aadmi Party MLA who was a part of NSUI, said that the ABVP raised the Naina Sahni murder case, infamously known as the Tandoor murder case, during the DUSU election campaign in 1995 as both Sahni and the accused, Sushil Sharma, were Congress members.
“I made women safety on campus one of my main poll issues. Despite all the odds, I won,” said Lamba, who became the third woman ever to win the DUSU president post. She did
Two key contenders
Since 1973, DUSU elections have been a contest between the Congress-affiliated NSUI and the RSS-backed ABVP, with the latter holding the clear upper hand.
In the past 10 years, ABVP has remained the dominant students’ group in DUSU. Between 2010-11 and 2019-20, it won the presidential post seven times, the vice-president’s post eight times, and the posts of secretary and joint secretary seven times each.
For two decades after the reforms were implemented in 1973, the NSUI won the top post just once in 1985 when Maken, an M.Sc (chemistry) student then sealed the polls.
Between 1973 and 1993, two other Congress members, Hari Shankar Gupta and Madan Singh Bisht, became DUSU presidents in 1978 and 1986 respectively, but both formed their own students’ outfit, before the elections after they were denied tickets by NSUI.
Bisht’s unit was called the Delhi Chhatra Morcha. “I have been active in students’ politics since 1981 and worked for students’ welfare. I knew then that I have the support of the students, which is why I formed my own students’ outfit,” said Bisht, a Congress leader and currently an MLA in the Uttarakhand assembly.
Gupta, now a former Congress MLA from Wazirpur in Delhi, and member of Delhi University’s University Court was part of a rebel NSUI faction when he contested DUSU elections in 1978. The faction later merged with NSUI.
Sanjay Kumar, professor and co-director of Lokniti at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), said the new outfits did not survive for long at DU.
“DU students’ politics has not changed much over the years. DUSU elections have always been between NSUI and ABVP. When Janata Dal came to power, a new students’ outfit called the Chhatra Janata Dal was formed. But it remained a fringe player. The Left outfits have also been a very small player in DUSU politics,” said Kumar.
Sri Ram Khanna explained why the ABVP remained dominant throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s. “ABVP became a voice against the establishment (there were largely Congress government’s at the Centre during that time) in DU. It managed to capture the imagination of students,” he said.
Some also believe the ABVP had an advantage in the direct election process because it was a cadre-based organisation. “They had an organised set-up in almost all DU colleges, and it helped them mobilise the votes. Unlike NSUI, which was governed by students, ABVP’s Delhi unit was always headed by a faculty member. For instance, when Arun Jaitley won the presi- dential election in 1974, it was Prabhu Chawla, then teaching in Swami Shraddhanand College, who was heading the ABVP’s Delhi unit. There were many more, including Raj Kumar Bhatia of PGDAV College, and Ramnath Vij of Hansraj College, who headed the ABVP while teaching in DU,” said a senior political analyst who asked not to be named.
In terms of gender representation in DUSU, the first woman to win any post on the panel was Purnima Sethi, who was elected as the joint secretary in 1974. In 1989, Anju Sachdeva, who contested as an independent candidate after she was denied a ticket by the ABVP, became the first woman president of DUSU. Four years later, NSUI’s Shalu Mallik won the post, followed by NSUI’s Alka Lamba in 1994 and ABVP’s Rekha Jindal, who is currently part of the BJP’s Delhi unit, in 1995. Several female candidates have won the post since 1989.
The Left-affiliated student groups, who have been active at DU campus since the 1980s, could not make much progress in DUSU polls although they have won individual college elections over the last few years.
Explaining the possible reason behind this, Nandita Narain, an associate professor at St Stephen’s College, said that DUSU elections are a reflection of Delhi politics. “In Delhi, before the entry of the AAP, it was always the competition between the Congress and the BJP. The largest crowd of students in DU are locals and therefore the same thing is reflected in the students’ politics here. So, DUSU is basically governed by local politics, which is dominated by the BJP and the Congress. They have funding and logistical support and that makes a huge difference,” she said.
Narain did her BA (honours) in mathematics and then an MA in the same subject from St Stephen’s College.
“Many colleges, where a large number of students are from outside Delhi, are not even part of DUSU. In many of these colleges, including LSR, people from Left students’ groups are coming in elected positions. But they do not participate in DUSU, and therefore it makes no difference to the university’s politics,” she added.
The Lyngdoh committee
In the 1990s and early 2000s, candidates often tried to lure students by giving freebies, such as food coupons and movie tickets, and the campaign processions resulted in massive traffic jams. Following a Supreme Court order in 2005, the Union ministry of human resource development in 2006 set up a committee headed by former chief election commissioner JM Lyngdoh to reform students’ union elections and put an end to money and muscle power in student politics.
The committee recommended that a candidate can spend a maximum of ₹5,000 on elections and even prescribed an age limit for candidates. It also recommended that candidates should have minimum 75% attendance, and barred them from contesting again if they lose an election. The committee also suggested banning printed posters, pamphlets, or any other printed material for the purpose of canvassing.
The Lyngdoh Committee recommendations had an impact in 2009, when the candidature of both ABVP and NSUI candidates was rejected. Manoj Chaudhury, who contested as an independent after being denied a ticket by ABVP, won the election that year.
His candidature was also cancelled for “over-expenditure and other violations”, but he was able to get his name reinstated.
“I managed to get it revoked from the varsity court, unlike NSUI and ABVP candidates. I won the poll by 11 votes,” said Chaudhury.
Over the years, parties have found ways to sidestep the Lyngdoh Committee recommendations in ingenious ways. For example, posters and banners appear across the campus every year to promote candidates, often with their names intentionally misspelt, so as to avoid action for defacing the walls.
In previous DUSU elections, the student groups have also used posters with the names and photos of actors such as Priyanka Chopra and Arjun Kapoor to push candidates who shared the same names.
“Students do that to avoid action even as the Delhi high court in 2018 clarified that if the people are able to pronounce or identify the names of candidates, then the spelling mistake can be ignored,” said a member of the committee.
Yet, despite the vibrancy of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, student activism in Delhi University has seen a sea change since the Covid-19 pandemic struck in March 2020, with campuses shut for large swathes since then. The slant towards online learning has minimised the chances of personal interactions, crucial to student politics, exacerbated by the fact that no DUSU elections haven’t been held since 2019.
Still, the politics of India today is deeply intertwined with the politics at Delhi University, which has given the country some of its tallest leaders. DUSU elections have set the tone for political discourse at the mainstream, from gender movements to economic issues, evidenced in the fact that a large number of political figures have trod a successful path from Delhi University to the state assemblies and Parliament.