The Aam Aadmi Party promised it would change politics, but many now see it as no different from the rest. Turns out, its student wing – the Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Samiti – might be falling into the same trap. As the campaign for Delhi University Students Union Elections heats up, the CYSS has found it hard to stick to its grand claims of bringing "issue-based politics" to a process ruled by money and muscle power.

From the get-go, the AAP students wing insisted it would work to change elections in Delhi University, dominated for years by the students wings of the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party. The union is currently held by the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, allied to the BJP, and has in the past been run by the Congress’ National Students Union of India.

The cynical antics of both of these outfits – fielding criminal candidates, confusing voters, distributing freebies – have been well documented and have become a regular, unremarkable feature of DUSU elections. The CYSS claimed it would stay away from these practices, but it hasn’t managed to go too far.

As if to make this point evident, on Monday, Delhi University authorities have written to all three organisations regarding violations of the election code – an issue that is yet to be resolved.

Grand promises

“Our aim is to make DUSU polls free from money and muscle power. We will do issue-based politics for student welfare,” Anupam Yadav, State President of CYSS told the news agency IANS.

The CYSS claimed that not only would it keep those with criminal backgrounds at bay from filing nominations but also abide by the Lyngdoh Committee’s recommendations, which specify that no more than Rs 5,000 per candidate should be spent on campaigning in the polls.

But that was easier said than done.

Mysterious survey

Earlier this month, huge hoardings projecting a big victory for the CYSS cropped up across the university campus. The chart projected CYSS getting 45% of the votes while ABVP and NSUI were shown to be settling at 38% and 9% of the votes respectively. When probed, however, no one knew where the survey came from.

Nor was it clear initially as to who had put up the hoardings, or who funded the survey, until the CYSS came clean and accepted that it had indeed commissioned the survey and put up its results across the campus.

The controversy didn’t end there. The hoardings referred to CommSense being the agency behind the polls, according to the Indian Express, but Google searches and queries to CYSS turned a blank. No such agency seems to exist.

The CYSS State President told the paper that he was not sure about the name of the agency which conducted the survey. “I am not aware of the name of the company which conducted the polls,” Yadav told the paper. "It was done by some independent agency."

All this seemed par for the course as this is pretty much the standard operating procedure at DU: the ABVP came under fire for doing just that a few days later.

Rain-dance culture

As the election day of September 11 comes closer, all parties, in their last ditch effort to woo students have taken to the tried and tested strategies of wooing students with free movie tickets, t-shirts, rock shows and concerts.

While AAP’s student wing said it would stay away from the “rain-dance” party culture in its campaigning, the party ended up organising its own rock show with the musician Vishal Dadlani. In the glittering ceremony at Delhi’s Talkatora Stadium, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal appeared on stage and promised free Wi-Fi across campus, higher education loan scheme and over one lakh jobs in a year.

Even though the Congress-backed NSUI has been accused of organising its own parties and providing tickets to concerts to woo student voters, Congress’ Delhi Chief Ajay Maken claimed that AAP had violated norms.

"Those who have been espousing clean politics and simplicity have violated every norm – we have written to the VC to take action against such blatant use of money," Maken told NDTV.

It isn’t just the rock shows and opinion polls, AAP’s student wing has also been accused of violating campaigning guidelines set by the Lyngdoh Committee which bar any outsider from entering colleges or campus to campaign for a candidate.

Violating protocol

Delhi minister for women and child development Sandeep Kumar even entered the classrooms of Swami Shraddhanand College to campaign for CYSS. A teacher from the college spoke to the Hindustan Times about the incident and claimed that when he objected to Kumar’s presence, the minister shut him down by saying that his government runs the college.

 

“When candidates came in while I was taking my B Com class, I allowed them to speak to the students,” the teacher was quoted as saying by the paper. “Within sometime, Kumar entered the classroom. When I objected, he said he was a minister and that I had no right to stop him as the Delhi government runs the college.”

The party has got flak for putting up large hoardings across the city campaigning for its candidates, which, its detractors claim, has been done using public money.

 

 

All this has earned the CYSS the ire of ex-AAP leaders and people on the social media.