Hindustan Times ST (Mumbai) - Live
‘Bulli Bai’ app victim to VP, student union
MUMBAI: Ten months after her name cropped as one of 100 Muslim women whose details were made available on Bulli Bai, an application made on open source-platform, GitHub, which allowed users to take part in their “auction”, 22-year-old Nidha Parveen was elected as the vice-president of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) Students’ Union.
Parveen, who hails from Kannur, Kerala studied at Delhi University and took part in the antiCitizenship Amendment Act / National Register of Citizens movement in 2019 before joining TISS to pursue a post-graduate degree at the Centre for Criminology and Justice at the institute’s School of Social Work.
Late on Friday night, Parveen – president of Fraternity TISS, part of the students’ wing of the Welfare Party of India, with meagre 12 members on campus -was elected as the new vice-president of the TISS Students’ Union, bagging 676 votes over her main opponents, Progressive Students Federation and SATH (Students’ Association for Transformation and Harmony) who secured 393 and 221 votes respectively.
Parveen contested as part of an alliance formed by The Ambedkarite Students’ Association (ASA). The alliance backed Dalit, Adivasi, Muslim, Northeastern and Queer candidates and went on win 10 out of 11 posts. Pratik Permey, a queer and tribal student activist became the president, while Dalit student leader Shivani Ilangovan was elected general secretary.
Digamber Surlata, a PhD scholar at TISS and an ASA member said Permey, a student of the School of Social Work, created history as the first genderfluid person to be elected to the post of president of students’ union.
Permey said, “With this election, we have hoisted a flag representing the ignored, invisible, marginalized voices.”
“The win was unexpected. Two weeks of campaigning was stressful,” a hijab-donning Parveen dressed in a grey and white salwar kameez said on Saturday.
Praveen recalled a moment during her campaign, “I was addressing a class and I started my speech saying, ‘As a student, as a Muslim woman’, and a male student said I can’t use the Muslim card. About 100 students applauded him. When we assert our identity, we get to know what others think of our identity,” she said.