Whatever election is held in Delhi, the entire country is paying attention to it. Be it the Delhi University Students Union (DUSU) elections or the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNU) elections, every election makes headlines in the media. On Monday, when the results were announced after almost two months of DUSU elections, there was a lot of discussion among people about it.
Another big reason is that elections will be held in Delhi in the next two months and the student union elections can be seen as a thermometer of big elections. Especially you can estimate how much influence each person has among young voters. The importance of these election results increased further when, after 7 years, the student wing of the NSUI Congress won the president’s post, because in recent years only the ABVP, supported by the BJP, had won the president’s post.
Is this the resurgence of the Congress ahead of the assembly elections?
The Delhi University Students’ Union elections may be the smallest elections in Delhi, but its political significance is very high. Therefore, from the BJP to the Congress, a large team of senior leaders from Delhi is deployed behind these elections. With the assembly elections due to be held early next year, the significance of these results seems to be quite high. Especially when Congress’ situation in Delhi is fragile and it will struggle to open its account in the assembly elections in Delhi after 10 years.
But no matter how much noise there is around the elections, it is also important that the total voters in the DUSU elections are only 1.5 lakh and this time the voting percentage was also about 7 per cent less compared to previous years. Normally it is over 40 percent, but this year it was only 35 percent, meaning only 51,000 students voted. So by getting around 15 thousand votes she won the post of NSUI president and also gave a big message but there will be around 1 crore 54 lakh voters in Delhi Assembly elections according to which this size sample is very small.
Did NSUI benefit from the student wing of the Aam Aadmi Party not participating?
Although the Aam Aadmi Party has been in power in Delhi for the last ten years, after initial setbacks in the Delhi University elections, the party’s student wing, CYSS, did not contest the Students’ Union elections. from the University of Delhi. However, despite the absence of CYSS in previous years, NSUI could not win the elections, so this time it would not be correct to give the credit of NSUI’s electoral victory to the student wing of the Aam Aadmi Party that stayed away from the electoral fight.
Still, one thing is that the Aam Aadmi Party will be much stronger in the assembly elections, so the good performance of the Congress student wing in DUSU does not seem to directly reflect on the Aam Aadmi Party’s performance in the assembly. However, in the results published on Monday, the left-wing student wing also obtained between 10 and 15 percent of the votes in different positions, while NOTA also obtained between 15 and 20 percent of the votes. This means that 25 to 30 per cent of the total votes cast did not go to the student wing of the BJP or the Congress.
The caste equation of the Delhi University elections is also different from that of the assembly elections.
Be it ABVP or NSUI, their major candidates in the Delhi University elections are mostly from two castes. In the last elections, the student wing offers Jat candidates or Gurjar candidates. This happens because these two castes are dominant in rural areas of Delhi. As a percentage of the total population of Delhi, Jats are around 6 per cent and Gurjars are 7 per cent, i.e. the total contribution of these two castes among Delhi voters is less than 15 per cent. The main reason for their predominance in the DU is that because of the way money is spent in small elections like universities, local candidates have a greater advantage. Also, rural voters, especially students from areas bordering Haryana, appear to be more active. At the same time, many ethnic and local issues dominate assembly elections. Also, mainstream parties are now focusing more on voters displaced from other states to Delhi because their population is continuously increasing.
The issues in student union elections are completely different from those in assembly elections.
While issues in assembly elections revolve around students, issues ranging from national issues to regional issues are more effective in assembly elections. At Delhi University many times the influence of money seems to be more important than the issues, which is why almost two-thirds of students abstain from voting. At the same time, the Delhi High Court also had to take strict action such as suspending the results this time. Therefore, it would not make sense in any way to compare the voting pattern of Delhi University students with the issues and voting patterns that emerged during the Delhi Assembly elections.
