“They cannot make anything better, they can only litter!”
In the course of one of my field engagements in Delhi University (DU), the aforementioned comment by a passerby caught my ear. Such a statement had significant bearing for two reasons.
One, the modus operandi of the process of electioneering can be less appealing to the general populace considering the wastage of resources (here, paper).
Two, the bigger picture where a sense of disillusionment rests with regard to the phenomenon of elections itself. In a nation characterised by many variants and a number of elections, any election campaign seeks to improve conditions from what is existing to that which is ‘better’.
Elections to student unions is one such example. From infrastructural improvements in the university to conditions of betterment outside of it, students and their parties often end up promising the world to the students.
Well, student life in a university becomes meaningless sans the larger notion of welfare.
Hence, a representative student body is one such mechanism to facilitate such welfare. Among many strategies, elections, that are generally supposed to be of a ‘healthy’ and ‘competitive’ nature, enable one such method to make it to the student body.
Such competition makes the process of election campaign colourful, yet discomforting at times. So why do we need them?
What Makes DUSU Elections Important?
With a rich historical legacy backing it, the Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) is one such prominent student bodies in the country. DU is one of the few remaining universities to conduct the exercise of polling. Not many public universities even permit student union elections.
While DU, Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and University of Hyderabad (HCU) are some of them permitting it presently; prominent omissions include Banaras Hindu University (BHU), Jamia Millia Islamia University (JMI), Allahabad University (AU), and most recently Rajasthan University (RU).
In the case of AU, the student union there has been replaced by a student council, and direct representation substituted by indirect elections. In Rajasthan, the state government has decided not to hold them during the current academic session.
Needless to mention, all of them have contributed largely to the process of democratising social life in the university, as well as outside of it.
Apart from the influence of student activism on national, regional, and local politics in some measure, such exercises of franchise have enriched the public sphere. Also, the art of cultivating leadership skills in a section of the burgeoning population of youth in the country is not just essential but also a fruitful exercise.
At a historical juncture when the Women’s Reservation Bill has seen the light of day, it must be remembered that university spaces have a productive role to play too.
University Spaces Are a Reflection of Democracy
Over the years of my field interactions on the theme of ideologies and identities intersecting for the makings of student political activism at DU, what overawed me was the level of enthusiasm that young students have displayed at a point in time when apathy is perceived as a natural phenomenon.
From getting politically socialised to bearing the mantle of socialising their younger counterparts, activists have asserted their ideological positions or identity-based reflections in the university.
The space of the university which is supposed to embark on democratising society is a clear mosaic and reflection of it. At times, there is dialogue and cooperation between these groups on various issues.
The resistance against various issues such as fee hikes draws uniform responses from counterparts. But on plentiful occasions, opposing ideological student organisations refuse to budge or look into the eye.
Against this background, the comeback of the DUSU elections is welcome and historic. This is so because an election to the student body were witnessed after a gap of four years having been halted by the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. Such a development had bearings, especially on the aspirations of prospective aspirants of political capital.
Student activists who were planning to contest the elections around that timeframe went into a permanent limbo, showering disappointment as well as feeling discouraged by a global event that has had devastating effects on societies globally.
Many of them have graduated from university and have walked into different forays of life.
However, a handful of them continued to persist and remained active on campus by continuing their academic pursuits while simultaneously embarking on enhancing their political capital.
COVID-19 Did Not Deter Student Activism in DU
The phase aligning with the COVID-19 pandemic bore testimony in this regard. Whether it was regarding online examinations, the Farmers’ protests, or the National Educational Policy, 2020, differing opinions were routed through online exchanges that included Twitterstorms and Facebook Live. Such developments in the university have certainly gone on to solidify the domain of digital activism.
Over the last three years, physical activity and programs reduced largely on account of the university shutdowns that were induced by state-directed lockdowns.
However, that did not deter activists in DU from their channels of activism. While their methods changed, the methodology remained the same.
Since March 2020, novel events have unfolded in the ambit of DUSU activism. Many of these were being witnessed for the first time. It started with creating awareness messages regarding the novel coronavirus on various social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Images relating to wearing masks, using sanitizers, or washing hands were uniformly seen across the online handles of these organizations.
This was followed by managing aid and relief in the form of raising funds or monetary donations, distributing food kits and rations to the people, helping students travel back to their hometowns by arranging buses and sponsoring train tickets, managing sanitization drives and even demanding student relief packages from the state.
As a natural alliance, while pro-government activists promoted the PM-Cares as a platform for making donations, opposing organisations took to social media to highlight the fallacies related to the policies of respective governments, either of the union or the states, depending on their ideological affinities.
A major highlight from this timeframe relates to the distribution of oxygen during the second wave of the pandemic. Almost all the student groups steadfastly made attempts to distribute oxygen to the public or at least facilitate such a process.
Activists created WhatsApp groups to enhance communication and messages were forwarded instantaneously to provide aid with a sense of urgency.
With time, the need for vaccination was also raised and addressed by activists. In this regard, I also recall one student group organising a free vaccination camp in their office premises.
Fostering a Spirit of Healthy Competition
While the recently held DUSU elections does bring back older images and memories dating before the pandemic, the novel coronavirus accentuated the formation of novel and innovative methods of student activism. The passage of time has ensured a hybridization of the methods wherein the online model and the offline are in a continuum.
It also has bearings for future public emergencies wherein we can be assured that our student community will be there to support the social systems with their ethic of service, using the street as well as digital activism as their armoury.
It is in this spirit that such leadership exercises continue to overwhelm and carry significance in the sphere of higher education. Fostering a spirit of healthy competition among the young will only aid us further in the project of nation-building.
(Soumodip Sinha is currently working an Assistant Professor at Bengaluru's Alliance University. The author also has a PhD in 'Student Politics in Delhi University.' This is an opinion piece and the views expressed are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them.)
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)