The declaration that Narendra Modi is the Bharatiya Janata Party’s prime ministerial candidate is already showing results.
The BJP’s student wing, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), swept the 2013 Delhi University (DU) polls, bagging three top positions out of four.
The ABVP candidates came out of the community centre near Police Ground in Maurice Nagar, which houses the counting centre, on the shoulders of party members chanting and screaming the names of the victorious candidates and that of Narendra Modi.
“Putting Narendra Modi’s picture on our pamphlets has worked wonders. On top of that, the declaration of NaMo as PM candidate on election day was the icing on the cake for us,” an ABVP member said.
ABVP’s Aman Awana (president), Utkarsh Chaudhary (vice-president) and Raju Rawat (joint secretary) won, while Karishma Thakur of National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) managed to win the position of secretary.
DUSU election 2013 polled 51,000 votes as against 1, 17,546 voters.
The new DUSU president, Aman Awana of ABVP, polled 17,875 votes to defeat his nearest rival, Vishal Chaudhary of NSUI, by a margin of 1,553 votes for the post of DUSU president.
Meanwhile, Utkarsh Chaudhary polled 14,968 votes to defeat his nearest rival, Kapil Sharma of NSUI, and Raju Rawat polled 15,643 votes to defeat Kushank Khari of NSUI.
However, Karishma Thakur of NSUI collected 14,632 votes, defeating her rival Anshu Lakra of ABVP for the post of secretary.
“We will fight against the four-year undergraduate programme (FYUP) and demand a complete rollback,” Aman Awana said after his victory was officially declared.
Utkarsh Chaudhary said: “It is not a time to celebrate but a time to work. Once we have accomplished what we are setting out to achieve, we will celebrate then,” he said.
Adding to that, Raju Rawat said: “The students have trusted us with a huge responsibility. We will improve hostel facilities and women’s safety and work on getting student concessions for the Delhi Metro. Most importantly, we will fight against the FYUP.”
Defending their loss, the official spokesperson for NSUI toldthat the voters had elected goons.
He claimed the ABVP had muscled out NSUI with goons and political and financial support from the BJP and denied that NSUI candidates had received any funds from the Congress party.
The biggest surprise of this DUSU election was recorded by the ultra-left All-India Students’ Association (AISA), which came third in all four posts in the DUSU central panel and managed to collect more than 5,000 votes in each of the 4 positions, including the one contested by presidential candidate Anjali of Hindu College who managed to bag about 8,229 votes.
It is being speculated that a major reason for ABVP’s win this year is due to the success of AISA and also because NSUI supported the FYUP.
AISA’s roaring entry into DUSU politics and its referendum on FYUP has swung a large amount of votes in their favour and against NSUI.
“We have contested clean. Neither did we spend crores, nor did we take students out for parties or lure them with bottles of alcohol. We didn’t have political parties openly supporting us. We are a student body and that is how it should be,” the official spokesperson of AISA said.
Incidentally, they had reported several irregularities to election commissioner Ashish Vohra.
“We had reported to the election commissioner that students had been taken out for parties by both ABVP and NSUI members two consecutive days before election day. But he didn’t do anything about it,” he added.
Congress camp Meanwhile, the Congress camp rejected claims that Modi impacted the DUSU elections.
“If they are saying that ABVP’s victory in DUSU this year is a sign of Modi’s impact and that this indicates that the BJP will also win the Assembly and Lok Sabha elections in Delhi, then the BJP should be ready to pack up in Gujarat and Punjab where NSUI won the university elections recently,” Congress general secretary Shakeel Ahmed said.
Delhi Pradesh BJP president Vijay Goel on Saturday congratulated the ABVP candidates on their memorable victory in the DUSU elections.
“The students of Delhi have given a clear message of change. The election results also point towards the mass appeal of Narendra Modi among the youth of the country,” he said.
