Jadavpur Varsity Polls: Left Reclaims Bastion; ABVP Goes Seat-Less

The Left retained its bastion in Kolkata’s Jadavpur University where elections to the student unions were held on 19 February 2020.

(Photo: Ishadrita Lahiri/The Quint)

The Left retained its bastion in Kolkata's Jadavpur University, where elections to the student unions were held on Wednesday, 19 February.

The results of the 12 seats that went to polls were declared on Thursday. For the first time in the history of the university, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student organisation of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), had fielded candidates for the polls.

Elections were held for three unions – the Arts Faculty Students' Union (AFSU), the Faculty Of Engineering and Technology Students' Union (FETSU) and the Science Faculty Students' Union (SFSU) – one for each of the three main colleges of the University.

Each union consists of a panel of four – the Chairperson, General Secretary, Assistant General Secretary (Day) and Assistant General Secretary (Evening).

There were a number of Left-affiliated (politically or ideologically) organisations in the running, namely the Students' Federation Of India (SFI, the student wing of the CPI(M), All India Students' Association (AISA, the student wing of the CPI-ML), the Democratic Student's Federation (DSF), the Revolutionary Socialist Front (RSF), and the Democratic Students' Alliance (DSA). Also, in the fray was an independent organisation, distancing itself from both the right and the left, called We The Independents (WTI), apart from the Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad (TMCP) and the ABVP.

In the science faculty results, which were the first to come, the WTI won all four seats in the panel with the SFI being a distant second.

The engineering faculty results which came soon after saw the DSF take all four seats with massive margin. Interestingly, the ABVP secured the second-highest number of votes in this faculty, but was almost 2500-plus votes behind the DSF in all seats. The organisation, however, managed more votes than the SFI and the TMCP in this faculty.

The Arts' Faculty Students' Union results took the longest to come with counting of votes and cross-checking by individual organisations. However, in the end, the SFI emerged victorious in all four seats with the DSA coming in a distant second.

The ABVP, which fielded candidates in nine out of the 12 seats, could not win any.

This is the first time in three years that the university held elections to the students' unions.

The state government had banned students' union elections across universities in West Bengal due to massive violence on campuses before the 2016 Assembly elections.

However, after protests by students and representations by institutions, the government announced that elections will take place in four universities, including Jadavpur and Presidency universities in Kolkata.

Jadavpur University was in news recently after BJP MP Babul Supriyo was met with massive protests and was allegedly heckled when he had gone to the campus for a programme. Supriyo had to later be "rescued" by Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar as the campus saw massive vandalism.