What do Gujarat student leaders want? Question after Gen Z protests

Several student leaders agree that campus elections should return.

The Gujarat University, the state’s largest, saw its last elections in 2020, when the NSUI won six of the eight senate seats. The two others went to the ABVP.

Devansh Brahmbhatt, 26, the ABVP’s Gujarat State Secretary, said students didn’t lose interest in politics, and, in fact, they participated enthusiastically when the last elections were held.

“Gen Z doesn’t believe in enduring it. They won’t tolerate it (injustice),” he said.

Brahmbhatt said complaints regarding the Gujarat Common Admission Service (a centralised admission system for colleges across the state), delayed government scholarships, and shortages of teachers in state universities and grant-in-aid colleges were some of the most common issues reaching the ABVP.

Meanwhile, Rahul Tharoda, 29, Gujarat National Students’ Union of India General Secretary (NSUI) and Gujarat University Senate member, said students now were more focused on academics and less willing to join political organisations. The NSUI, therefore, was taking its recruitment efforts to colleges, hostels and paying guest accommodations, he said.

He criticised the GCAS admission process, saying it can stretch over months and eat into teaching, examination and extracurricular time. He also pointed out the lack of permanent faculty members, water problems and inadequate lectures in affiliated colleges.

Dharmik Mathukiya, an architect and state president of Association of Students for Alternative Politics (the AAP’s student wing) Gujarat, said student elections were discontinued in mainstream institutions in Gujarat because of “violence and clashes associated with student politics”, but he also argued for how other states have continued to hold the elections.

“If you don’t hold elections, then you can never understand what student rights are, what students want, what problems they are facing.
These issues will never reach the government,” said Mathukiya. Instead of cancelling elections, he suggested increasing security.

Nitish M Nair, 32, former state secretary of Students’ Federation of India (SFI) Gujarat and an advocate, believes Gujarat’s student movement had “weakened” over time, and pointed to the 1974 Navnirman Movement as an example of how powerful student mobilisation could become.

Satyesha Leuva, 27, State Secretary of SFI Gujarat and an advocate, said SFI worked around students’ rights, social reforms and issues affecting marginalised sections.

On the CJP protests, Tharoda said, the government was “scared of students coming onto the streets”.

ABVP’s Brahmbhatt said, “The movement of the students was right. But… political parties came there and started speaking about the restoration of Article 370,” he said, adding that issues such as LGBTQ+ rights and religious slogans had nothing to do with the NEET protest.

According to Brahmbhatt, the ABVP did protest on the NEET paper leak “outside the National Testing Agency’s office on May 13, a day after the NEET paper leak was confirmed, and demanded the NTA director’s resignation and fast-track courts”. He said that protest drew as heavy a security presence as the later Jantar Mantar demonstration but “almost no media coverage”.

However, Brahmbhatt was clear that violence on campus should not happen.

Brahmbhatt, an MSU Baroda gold medallist now pursuing a PhD, explicitly said that he did not intend to join the BJP full-time. “I am doing my PhD. My mind is set that going forward I want to become a professor.”

From campus to party offices

Several in the current leadership of the BJP and the Congress have seen a similar progression: a campus issue led them to a student organisation; organisational work gave them responsibilities and networks; those networks eventually opened a path for them into mainstream politics.

Congress Spokesperson Manish Doshi joined the NSUI in 1990 while studying engineering at LD College of Engineering, where a protest over the hostel mess bill led to the Nav Nirman agitation in 1974. He said he came from a simple, rural family with no political background.

“I joined the NSUI to fight for campus issues,” he said. The issues were often ordinary ones: hostel facilities, fees, examinations and access to university authorities. He recalled campaigns against excessive fees charged by private institutions, including an MBA/MCA fee-refund agitation over more than ₹17 crore charged without AICTE approval and against donation-based admissions in homeopathy colleges, which he credits with today’s centralised single-window admission system in Gujarat.

“These issues required long-term connection and consistent effort,” Doshi said. “The main thing is staying connected with the campus, representing issues properly to administrators and principals.”

That process took him from NSUI worker to district president in Surendranagar, then state general secretary, then into Youth Congress and mainstream Congress politics. He credits senior Congress figures — Prabodh Raval, former Gujarat Congress president and education minister; former chief minister Amarsinh Chaudhary; Ahmed Patel; Arvind Sanghvi; and Sanat Mehta — with guiding him along the way.

Doshi estimated that about half of the Congress party’s active young leaders have NSUI or Youth Congress background.

“Elections are essential for developing new campus leadership,” he said. “If there are issues, regulate or control them, but don’t suppress student representation entirely.”

Dr Indravijaysinh Gohil, now Working President of the Gujarat Pradesh Congress Committee, entered the NSUI in 2001 after helping fellow students following the 2001 Bhuj earthquake. He rose to become the NSUI state president (2003-2009). He was then the first elected president of the Gujarat Pradesh Youth Congress in 2009, under an internal-election system introduced nationally by Rahul Gandhi. He noted that former Rajasthan CM Ashok Gehlot was NSUI’s first state president.

Bhavik Solanki, 34, a former NSUI and Youth Congress worker now working at the block level for the party, described a more combative apprenticeship — including, by his own account, “vandalising a college campus and locking a principal in his office during a 2013-14 protest”. He said he currently has seven FIRs against him, all linked to protests, effigy-burnings and road blockades. He credited Doshi and Gohil as his political mentors.

Dr Anil Patel, who joined the Bharatiya Jan Sangh in 1974 and has held party and government positions continuously since, including Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation councillor (2000-2010), spent only about six months in the ABVP before moving directly into full-time party organisational work. Even so, he described ABVP as the training ground the BJP relied on.

Union Home and Co-operation Minister Amit Shah is seen among the party’s strongest leaders with roots in the ABVP.

Before Naresh Desai became Gujarat state general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha (BJYM), he was a student at Bhavan’s College, where a lack of basic facilities and “nuisance elements” on campus pushed him towards ABVP.

Desai joined the ABVP in 2010 at Bhavan’s College, where he said students faced fee-related problems, inadequate sports facilities and “nuisance elements”. The ABVP, he said, offered a path to fix those problems. “The ABVP is an organisation that teaches the youth to work for the nation… They work on that ideology, along with the Hindutva ideology, which I also liked.”

His proudest achievement is keeping the 2015 Patidar, Thakor and Dalit agitations from entering college campuses. By 2019, he had moved into the BJP; in 2021, he became the BJYM’s state general secretary. He credited MLAs Amit Thaker and Kaushik Jain, former BJP general secretary Pradipsinh Vaghela, former BJYM president Rutvij Patel, general secretary Prashant Korat and Hemang Joshi for his rise.

Desai puts the conversion rate from ABVP into full-time BJP politics at roughly 10 percent, with the rest moving onto other Sangh-affiliated organisations, business or employment.

(Kalindi Jha is an intern at The Indian Express, Ahmedabad)