With Delhi University (DU) issuing a notification appointing the Chief Election Officer for the conduct of the DU Students’ Union (DUSU) elections, the student organisations have started launching pre-election campaigns.
The students’ bodies are trying to recruit new students and win the confidence of existing students. V.K. Kaul from the Department of Business Economics has been appointed as the Chief Election Officer. The election dates have not been announced yet.
The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) has announced a list of short-listed candidates for its pre-election campaign. Sudhir Dedha, Ankiv Baisoya, Jagat Tanwar, Shakti Singh, Ravi Yadav, Navneet Kumar, Pragya Malik, Yogita Rathi and Jyoti Chaudhary are the nine candidates out of which four will be chosen, informed an ABVP leader.
Students have begun organising rallies to win back the trust of DU students after they lost two posts in the DUSU elections last year.
ABVP Delhi State Secretary Bharat Khatana said, “We have been between the DU students all over the year which has been the reason for our victories in the past elections. We fought for various demands of the students last year, starting from making sanitary napkins GST-free to successful installation of vending machines in various colleges. We are confident that we would be triumphant in the elections again as we did a lot of work during the last academic year.”
The All India Students Association has not announced any name yet, but has started winning the confidence of the students by coming out with a student’s report card in which 20,000 students from the university have given their feedback about what they feel the situation of the university has been during the past four years.
The report cart, which will be released on August 21, seeks to showcase the “shortcomings” of the Narendra Modi government over the past four years with respect to jobs and placements, availability of hostels, providing transportation facility to students, fee hike in colleges, women safety and violence on campus.
The National Students’ Union of India has not launched its campaign yet but has said that it would like to push for electoral reforms this year by seeking a more transparent election with the use of VVPAT machines.