ABVP trounces NSUI in GU senate elections, bags six out of 10 seats

In a keenly contested election, ABVP lost two of the seats — Postgraduate (arts) and Education — by a margin of one vote. These two seats went to NSUI representatives — Mukesh Patel of PG (Art) and Pravin Nakum from the law faculty. NSUI also won education and PG (commerce) seats.

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ABVP won PG (science) and Undergraduate (science) seats by a margin of 18 and six votes, respectively. It also won UG (Art) and UG (commerce) seats by a margin of 44 and 70 votes respectively. The winners of the medical and dental faculties were Ravi Umraniya and Radhika Agnihotri, respectively.

Vice chancellor M N Patel told reporters that the nominations of the candidates from medical and dental faculties were rejected by the election committee of the university on certain technical grounds. But the Gujarat High Court on Tuesday ruled that the nomination forms of the two students were in order and there was no ground for their rejection. Patel said that since the HC okayed the nominations and there was no one contesting against them, they were declared elected unopposed.

However, the ballot counting in the main university building saw violence between NSUI and ABVP representatives. The police resorted to lathi-charge to bring the situation under control. Both the NSUI and ABVP leaders claimed that at least two representatives from each group sustained injures and had to be hospitalised.

ABVP’s Ahmedabad city secretary Pinkal Bhatia said, “I strongly condemn the police using baton on ABVP representatives in which two of our supporters sustained injuries and we had to call ambulance to shift them to the hospital.’’ When asked if he would demand action against the police, he said, “we will decide after consulting with the state leadership”.

He also claimed that his group would work harder next year to make GU’s senate ‘NSUI mukta’. Bhatia said that ABVP would take out a victory procession in the campus on Wednesday. NSUI secretary Subhan Saiyed said that two of NSUI activists were injured in the police lathicharge and accused the police of being biased against NSUI activists.

When asked about the violence, V-C said that the violence took place when police stopped ABVP from taking out the victory procession in the campus. He said authorities had banned entry of all vehicles and holding of any demonstration or procession on Tuesday due to counting of votes.

More than 150 police personnel and some armed jawans of State Reserve Police had been deployed on the campus to maintain law and order.