© IE Online Media Services Pvt Ltd
Tags:
Journalism of Courage
The Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union (JNUSU) on Sunday elected its first Dalit president, Dhananjay, from the Left-backed groups, in fresh elections that were held after a four-year Covid-induced gap.
The United Left panel managed to get a clean sweep in the JNUSU elections, defeating its nearest rival – the RSS-affiliated ABVP. Dhananjay, who belongs to the All India Students Association (AISA), received 2,598 votes out of a total of 5,656, beating ABVP’s Umesh Chandra Ajmeera by 922 votes.
Among a list of agendas presented by the new JNUSU president, one of them involves taking on those he believes, are creating a propaganda against the campus. “Post Covid, in the four-year gap, there have been many changes in the issues of the campus. We want to raise our voices against this certain section which is creating propaganda on the campus and bringing a bad name to JNU through certain films,” Dhananjay told The Indian Express.
The youngest of six siblings in his family, Dhananjay hails from Gaya in Bihar, and was elected as the first-ever Dalit president from Left-backed groups after nearly three decades.
As the president of the union, Dhananjay plans to push for increase in the stipend amounts of fellowships, improvement in campus infrastructure, and fair and diverse faculty appointments in the varsity.
Dhananjay, a PhD student from the School of Arts and Aesthetics, studied at Delhi University, where he was part of the protests against the four-year undergraduate programme.
Dhananjay’s father is a retired policeman. The reason behind the Left panel’s win, Dhananjay believes, is the “trust the student community has always had in the United Left.”
According to a statement released by the All India Students’ Association (AISA), “(After facing) caste discrimination… (it) ignited his [Dhananjay’s] passion for a good education so that no one else faced the same discrimination that he did.
“His father, a retired policeman, faced caste discrimination at the hands of the villagers, who only addressed him by his caste name and did not give due respect for his role as a policeman. It was due to these experiences, that his father urged him to pursue engineering, so that Dhananjay can live his life with dignity. Even though Dhananjay had a good academic record, he could not secure admission in a government college and private education was outside the means of his family. However, the family living a life of economic hardship, prioritised education.” the statement revealed.
