Among the saffron scarves, loud drums, and frenzied dance on counting day on Saturday, there was a small group that continued to cheer after they had lost the battle – the Left-affiliated All India Students’ Association.
A non-entity all these years in the Delhi University Students’ Union elections, it managed to crawl to the number three position polling only about 2,000 votes less than the Congress-affiliated National Students’ Union of India did. “We are emerging and if we keep working hard, we have a chance at the DUSU. We are just around 5,000 or 6,000 votes behind the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad. And the NSUI, which we are catching up with, was once the biggest students’ association at the university, which always clinched at least one seat. It is just a matter of time,” said Sunny Kumar of the AISA.
He said that the AISA did not have a presence in all the 50 colleges that come under the DUSU, but they had every intention of expanding. “In more than 20 colleges we have either lead or very closely contested with the ABVP and the NSUI. It is in the rest 25 and more colleges where we are relatively new and could not transform our presence into votes. This is our target for the immediate future. The AISA is growing very fast every year while the ABVP and the NSUI have reached a saturation point...We did not have the money or the muscle power that is employed by both the ABVP and the NSUI, but we managed to get this far,” he added. The AISA has been active on campus throughout the year, and was one of the first organisations to start protesting the four-year undergraduate programme by conducting referendums and talks and taking out protest marches on the streets.
It campaigned by diving its team into smaller groups that went from classroom to classroom talking to students.
