The victory of the RSS’ student wing, Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), in the Panjab University Campus Students’ Council (PUCSC) election for the second consecutive time is being hailed as a proof of the BJP’s growing traction among young voters in Punjab.
In Punjab itself, the chatter was less about Gen Z and more about a tactical marriage of convenience: the ABVP’s last-minute alliance with the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD)’s student wing, Student Organisation of India (SOI). Coming less than six months before the Punjab Assembly elections, some saw this pact as a possible sign of a similar tie-up between the BJP and the Sukhbir Badal-led SAD in the state.
Yet, a sharper question remains: What does the PUCSC poll outcome reveal about Panjab University, an iconic institution caught in a perennial tug-of-war between the Punjab government and the Centre? And why should it not be read as a verdict on the state’s electorate? To decipher it, one could look at the university’s history.
PU’s long arc
Born in Lahore on October 14, 1882, after splitting from the University of Calcutta, PU was midwifed by the Anjuman-i-Punjab, a literary and cultural movement spearheaded by orientalist Dr Gottlieb Wilhelm Leitner, then principal of Lahore Government College. It was funded by the princely states of Kashmir, Patiala, Kapurthala, and Bahawalpur, among others.
From the beginning, PU had a fiercely autonomous character. It did not depend on a state treasury, but relied on its own earnings as an examining body.
Then came Partition. PU became perhaps the only university in India to be partitioned. Reborn on the Indian side, it wandered through Hoshiarpur and Shimla before finally anchoring itself in Chandigarh in 1949, purchasing over 500 acres of land at Rs 3,000 per acre to build a modern campus designed by Pierre Jeanneret.
Over the decades, PU produced many luminaries, including former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who also taught economics here, ex-PM I K Gujral, ex-President Shankar Dayal Sharma, former Nepal PM Baburam Bhattarai, and Nobel laureate Har Gobind Khorana. The academic careers of almost every chief minister and notable politician in the region are rooted in PU.
In the late 1960s, a PU hostel room was considered more opulent than a bedroom in a prosperous home, recalls senior advocate M L Sarin.
But the varsity’s golden era was cut short. The 1966 reorganisation of Punjab, which once encircled Delhi from three sides, triggered a financial meltdown. New state universities disaffiliated their colleges, and by 2000, Punjab had frozen its annual funding to PU at Rs 20 crore with Chandigarh, a Union Territory, contributing the rest.
A 1976 panel had fixed a 60:40 Centre-Punjab ratio for the funding of PU; the attempts to shift the varsity’s deficits onto the Centre’s University Grants Commission (UGC) went nowhere.
A possible solution appeared when alumnus Manmohan Singh, after becoming the PM, proposed a central university status for PU. Prof Arun Grover, a physicist who served as PU’s Vice-Chancellor from 2012 to 2017. says that while Akali CM Parkash Singh Badal agreed, the Congress party’s then leader Capt Amarinder Singh rejected the proposal, insisting that the university was and should remain part of Punjab.
In the wake of a legal battle, the Centre offered to shoulder the burden of paying salaries to PU’s teaching and non-teaching staff. “PU is now an orphan institution,” laments Grover. Today, the varsity limps along with roughly half the regular faculty it needs.
PU’s poor finances eventually opened the door to a spiralling battle of control over it. There was a flashpoint in 2025 when the Centre proposed sweeping structural reforms in the university’s governance, slashing its Senate from 90 members to 31 and stripping its graduates of voting rights. The Centre also replaced the elected Syndicate, the university’s decision-making body, with members appointed by it.
The Punjab government was outraged over such proposals. AAP CM Bhagwant Mann slammed the move as “unconstitutional” and “Nadir Shahi farman”. Students and faculty members united under the Panjab University Bachao Morcha, launching an agitation that shut down the campus and forced postponement of exams before the Centre finally withdrew the order.
But the faultlines between the Centre and the state continue to surface.
When the PU administrators quietly stripped the campus signage of Punjabi earlier this year, the regional student group SATH—its name itself a Punjabi word for a community gathering—retaliated by blackening the boards. The university eventually reinstated the language.
Similar faultlines run through campus politics. Legacy student outfits such as the Student Organisation of Panjab University (SOPU) and the Panjab University Student Union (PUSU) have faded, their space taken by national players such as the ABVP and the Congress’s student wing, NSUI, alongside the AAP’s student arm, Association of Students for Alternative Politics (ASAP). The Left acts as a watchdog through the SFS (Students For Society), which made history in 2018 by electing the PUCSC’s first woman president, Kanupriya.
Regional identity politics also continues to spawn local student outfits such as SATH and SAAKHI. The former unfurled a giant photo of its mascot Jaswant Singh Khalra, the slain human rights activist, at PU after it bagged the vice-president’s post in the student union poll in 2025.
2027 alliance
In this fractured landscape of student politics, the ABVP’s back-to-back win in the PUCSC presidential election is being seen in a section of state political circles as a sign of the BJP’s rise in the university.
However, the ABVP’s last-minute alliance with the SOI remained a significant factor this time. So what does it mean when the ABVP needs the SOI, and vice versa?
As their rivals tried to run down the win, the ABVP and the SOI made a conscious attempt at inclusivity, raising slogans of “Bharat Mata ki Jai” followed by “Jo Bole So Nihal” at the iconic student centre, popularly known as StuC, on the campus.
What impact, if any, the PUCSC results would have on young voters in the Punjab hinterland is anyone’s guess, especially when disillusionment with the mainstream panthic parties is being amplified by new political outfits like MP Amritpal Singh’s Akali Dal (Waris Punjab De). Whether the ABVP-SOI alignment would translate into a similar one between the BJP and the SAD is an open question.
What this heritage university, and the emotions it arouses, tells us is something more fundamental about Punjab itself. Beyond the slogans and poll maths lies a deep resistance to ideological homogenisation. The spirit of PU, much like Punjab, remains fiercely proud, forever wary of outside diktats.
ABVP’s Ankit Bidhan after Punjab University Student Council election victory. (ANI Video Grab) 
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