Samajwadi Party’s student wing dominates Allahabad University’s student body polls, wins top 4 posts

The Samajwadi Party’s student wing SCS swept the Allahabad University Student Union polls, winning four of five posts.

The results to the AUSU poll, which were declared on Saturday night, saw the Samajwadi Chatra Sabha bag the posts of president, vice president, joint secretary and cultural secretary, while the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) won the general secretary post alone. The ABVP is the student wing of the RSS-BJP.

SCS candidate Awanish Kumar Yadav defeated his nearest rival Mrityunjay Rao Parmar, an independent candidate, by 552 votes to win the post of president. Awanish polled 3,226 votes while Mrityunjay got 2,674 votes. The ABVP’s Priyanka Singh stood a distant third with 1,588 votes.

For the vice president’s post, SCS’s Chandrasekhar Chaudhary beat his ABVP rival Shivam Kumar Tiwari by 72 votes. Chandrashekhar got 2,249 votes while Shivam managed 2,177 votes. Vijay Singh Baghel of the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI), the student wing of the Congress party, came third with 1,661 votes.

In 2015, the ABVP had bagged four out five posts except the president’s post. In 2016, the SCS had won three posts of vice-president, general secretary and cultural secretary but the ABVP had bagged the posts of president and the joint secretary.

Since the restoration of the student union at the central university in 2012, the SCS has dominated the AUSU polls. It won in 2012, 2014 and even in 2015 when it supported independent candidate Richa Singh, who went on to become the first woman president of the AUSU since Independence.

There were total 19,987 eligible voters at AU, including 13,385 boys and 6,602 girls, this year. A total 9,181 votes (45.93%) were cast. The five top posts also registered 1,609 votes under none of the above (NOTA) option.