North to South,students vote today

Speaker after speaker invoked revolutionary poets to garner the support of students,who sat on the lawns to listen to the candidates. More than 7,000 JNU students will cast their vote on Friday to elect the next union.

Akbar Chawdhary,from the ultra-Left All India Students’ Association (AISA),raised concerns on the autonomy of the university’s Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment and how education was now the privilege of a few.

In the last election,AISA had three of the four central panel seats,with the president’s post going to the Democratic Students’ Federation’s V Lenin Kumar. DSF goes to the polls solo this time with the All India Students’ Federation (AISF) breaking its campus alliance with the Students’ Federation of India (SFI) and now DSF,formed after the senior leadership of SFI dissolved its JNU unit.

DSF candidate Ishan Anand highlighted the previous union’s role in spearheading the movement post the December 16 gangrape and in increasing the amount of merit-cum-means scholarship by Rs 500. “We protested,sat on hunger strike and appealed. Now we will shut the university if need be and make sure that scholarships are increased for JNU students,” he said.

Chandrasen,the candidate from a new students’ body called Concerned Students,criticised the previous union and said,“This election is not independent of the situation in the country. Someone who said that poverty is a state of mind is dreaming of becoming prime minister.”

National Students’ Union of India candidate Pran Veer Singh raised campus issues. Chhatra Janata Dal United-backed foreign candidate,Zhassulan Akhmetbekov said,“Being from a post-Soviet nation,I know more about communism than any party here; international politics is not our problem,our problems are in this campus.”