Girl from Assam makes a mark in Delhi University student politics

Debangana Baruah spent her first few days in the city wondering why everybody raised their voices when they spoke, and how she was to manage and live here till she completed college. More than two years later, despite increasing incidences of violence and discrimination against people from the Northeast, she believes that the city is not that bad. After all, she has managed to convince a major chunk of her college-mates to vote her as their union president, making her the first person from the Northeast to hold the highest students’ union post in any Delhi University college.

“The best part of me winning is that as an Assamese girl, I was able to influence people in my college, which has very few people from the Northeast, to vote for me. And, I feel this is like opening a gateway for other Northeast students to interact freely with other students. The atmosphere is so different here that they usually tend to interact only among themselves,” she says.

This third-year English Honours student at Daulat Ram College lives in the college hostel and has the same hassles as any other girl from the Northeast who lives in the Capital.

“The people in my place are very soft-spoken and polite and so when I first came to the city, I was taken aback. A lot of people in Delhi are very dominating and aggressive and it was scary at first, but then you get used to it,” she said. She has made so many friends in college that she was voted as the vice-president last year, she added. “I had to convince people a lot and I was not expecting to win last year...this year I was more confident.”

This year, however, she kept her agenda simple. “I didn’t want to make any promises that I wouldn’t be able to keep and it was very important to be honest, so I focused on two things only that students really worry about and need. It is the lack of a photostat machine and an ATM. Our college students have to either take a rickshaw till Kamala Nagar or walk to some other colleges or facilities to get this work done. It would save a lot of trouble to have these two facilities and that is what I am hoping to achieve this year as the president,” she said.