The Left has swept the Jawaharlal Nehru Students’ Union election yet again, but not without some hiccups.
It has found a new challenger in the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA) — which aims at creating a Dalit, tribal, OBC and Muslim alliance on the campus — apart from the RSS-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad.
This time, the SFI, the AISA and the DSF, a powerful breakaway faction of the SFI, came together in an unprecedented attempt to consolidate the Left vote.
Victory margin
The move clicked: but for this alliance, the Left could have lost the presidential post to the ABVP after 17 years. The victory margin on this post was below 500 votes.
BAPSA has clearly emerged as a long-term challenge for the Left. There are some reasons for this.
One, OBC reservation introduced some years ago not only increased the student strength on the campus but dramatically raised the proportion of social groups BAPSA is trying to woo.
The Left was traditionally a social coalition in JNU. While some of its supporters were committed communists, many of those who were supporters of parties such as the BSP, the Samajwadi Party, the RJD, the DMK, the Congress, also voted for the Left on the campus to defeat the ABVP, in the absence of a credible alternative.
The aforesaid expansion in student strength and the rise of BAPSA provided fertile ground for an ‘identitarian’ organisation of the “socially oppressed” instead of a class-based Left, threatening the social coalition that the Left had woven for decades.
“What is required is representation for socially oppressed people. BAPSA promises that,” said a JNU student activist not wishing to be named.
Dramatic shift
The Left also contributed to this mood: it made a dramatic shift to appropriating B.R. Ambedkar in the past few years, modifying its traditional Lal Salaam slogan to Jai Bheem, Lal Salaam. In this shift, BAPSA’s political language of “oppressed identities” became mainstream.
BAPSA has got 800-900 votes on all seats of the central panel this time.