Former Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU) president Dhananjay will contest the upcoming Bihar Assembly election on a CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation ticket from the Bhore constituency in Gopalganj district, The Indian Express has learnt.
Sources in the All India Students’ Association (AISA), the organisation of which Dhananjay belongs, said, “He has filed his nomination today and more details are awaited.”
Dhananjay, who hails from a Dalit family in Gaya, is currently a PhD student in theatre studies at JNU. The youngest of six siblings, he is the son of a retired policeman and a homemaker. He completed his schooling in Ranchi, graduated in political Science from Delhi University’s Aurobindo College, and went on to pursue his Master’s from Ambedkar University Delhi.
The polling in Bihar will be conducted in two phases, on November 6 and November 11. The counting of votes and announcement of results will take place on November 14.
AISA is the students’ wing of the CPI-ML. Dhananjay began his political journey as a student councillor at Ambedkar University Delhi before rising through AISA’s ranks. Last year, he became the first Dalit president of JNUSU in nearly two decades.
Speaking to The Indian Express earlier, Dhananjay had said instances of caste discrimination had shaped his political position. “There were several incidents when I came to Delhi too, wherein parents of my roommates would ask which caste I belonged to. From a very young age, I saw that my family was treated differently,” he had said.
During his tenure as JNUSU president, Dhananjay took up the issue of increasing fellowship stipends and alleged ideological bias in faculty recruitment. “A Dalit student, despite being hardworking and talented, is not being considered in interviews…due to a single-ideology group of professors being appointed,” he had said.
Dhananjay is the third former JNUSU president to have entered electoral politics after Aishe Ghosh who was president in 2018 and was the CPI(M) candidate from the Jamuria Assembly constituency in the 2021 West Bengal elections and Kanhaiya Kumar who contested the Begusarai Lok Sabha seat in 2019 for the CPI (M-L) Liberation and is now the AICC in-charge for Congress’s student wing NSUI.
The CPI-ML, which has a strong organisational base in several parts of Bihar, has been expanding its youth outreach ahead of the Assembly elections.
