Why the Left Consistently Wins JNU Students Union Elections and the BJP Affiliated Right Fails

The Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) election results attract national attention year after year because it’s the only premier university in the Hindi heartland which continues to remain a Left citadel, even after an avowedly rightist party has come to power at the Centre more than a decade ago. That the Left group made a clean sweep in the JNUSU election again when the votes were counted on November 6 was nothing exceptional. However, there was something unprecedented about the results last week: for the first time in the JNUSU’s history, three women candidates were elected to the central panel. Earlier, women have been elected to each of the office bearer posts — president, vice president, general secretary and joint secretary — but never had three women occupied the hot seats at the same time. The crowning glory was that all three represented the same panel; the Left Unity group.

The obvious question is: how has JNU remained a Left bastion even as campuses in the north and central India are increasingly saffronized? 

JNU has been a target of ideological conversion right from the day Narendra Modi was sworn in as the Prime Minister of the country. His government has left no stone unturned to neutralize the Left’s influence in the JNU campus.Two vice chancellors who have presided over the university’s fate in the last decade have been hardcore adherents of the RSS’s Hindu supremacist ideology. Five hundred-odd appointments that have been made in the last 10 years for teaching positions and non-teaching staff have had one necessary, though unstated, condition: affinity with the RSS and/or other frontal organizations. All the academic/ administrative positions have been handed out to those who swear unquestioning loyalty to the ruling ideological dispensation.

That’s not all. The saffron brigade realized that the School of Social Sciences (SSS), the biggest school, was responsible for imparting radical ideas in the minds of the students. It could not disband the school; but to neutralize its effect, the administration decided to introduce teaching of engineering and management courses — though that decision went against the very philosophy behind the foundation of the university as a research centre — presupposing that such students would be easy fodder for the rightist, reactionary ideas.

The question is: if the saffron establishment remains in power for another 10 years, can the ABVP capture the hearts and minds of the JNU students and leapfrog to a position of dominance in the JNUSU? Not impossible, but not a cakewalk either.

But despite this sustained, all-out, effort, the saffron establishment has not succeeded in its primary mission: to see Lal Salaam slogan disappear from the university. That does not mean all efforts to saffronize the JNU campus have completely gone waste. That’s far from the truth. The Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) —  the student wing of the ruling BJP — has emerged as the principal opposition student group in the campus. That’s no mean achievement.

When we were student activists in the JNU — in late 1970s and early 80s — the ABVP existed, but it had a negligible presence. Even the National Student’s Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of the Congress party, was a marginal force those days. The main electoral battle then was within the left-liberal spectrum; between the student organizations of the communist parties on the one hand and a coalition of the democratic, socialist and liberal student outfits on the other. The democratic, socialist, liberal outfits which had no affiliation outside the campus have ceased to exist today. Only those student bodies which are part of a national platform have survived; of course, some new student organizations have also come into existence.

In the current scenario, the fact that the NSUI continues to remain on the fringes of the JNU politics even as the ABVP has made giant strides to come to the centre-stage of student activism is enough proof that the Modi administration’s efforts have paid dividends, though not to the extent that the ruling party had expected or wished for.

The question is: if the saffron establishment remains in power for another 10 years, can the ABVP capture the hearts and minds of the JNU students and leapfrog to a position of dominance in the JNUSU? Not impossible, but not a cakewalk either. The ABVP today gets barely 20 to 25 percent votes polled in the election. So almost 75 percent voters are against the ABVP, and most of these voters belong to one shade of the Left or the other. In fact, the name of the victorious coalition  — Left Unity group — is a misnomer. The truth is: this coalition brings together only three organizations — All India Students’ Association ( AISA), affiliated to the CPI (ML),  Students’ Federation of India ( SFI) affiliated to the CPI (M) and Democratic Student Federation (DSF), a breakaway group of the SFI.

There are several other Left student organizations — such as All India Students’ Federation (AISF), Progressive Students’ Association (PSA), Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’s Association (BAPSA) —  which are unequivocally opposed to the communal politics of ABVP/BJP/RSS, but which are contesting separately as they could not be accommodated suitably in the broader Left panel. These groups may not constitute a large force to win election on their own, but they get into the electoral contest to assert and exhibit their distinct identity. 

In the current election for the post of the president, for example, Aditi Mishra, the eventual winner, received 1,861 votes while the ABVP’s Vikas Patel managed 1,447 votes. But it must not be lost sight of the fact that Shinde Vijayalakshmi of the PSA polled more than 1,200 votes. AISF and BAPSA too polled substantial votes, though comparatively less in number. 

It’s difficult for the ABVP to breach these ideological fortresses; it has already won over the support of the anti-Left and pro-Hindutva student groups; it has to win over most of the fence-sitters to reach the podium. But it cannot attract the support of the ideologically neutral students  so long as it does not shed its profile as a misogynistic, Islamophobic, violent student group doing a hatchet job for the ruling establishment. That’s too much to expect.

---

Nalini Ranjan Mohanty is the Director of the Jagran Institute of Management and Mass Communication. He is a former Assistant Editor with the Times of India and a former Resident Editor of the Hindustan Times.