Why ABVP has stronger chances to win JNUSU elections

A spectre is haunting JNU — the spectre of Hindutva fascism. All the powers of social democracy on campus were supposed to enter into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre, but the internecine ideological battles within the Left, as well as the recent allegation of rape against a leader of the All India Students’ Association (AISA) has resulted in a fractured field that leaves open the prospect of victory in the September 9 JNUSU elections for the Sangh-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).

Said victory is by no means certain. Although the ABVP doubled its vote share and won the post of joint secretary in last year’s (2015) election — their panel of candidates polled more cumulative votes than any other, finishing second in the races for vice-president and general secretary — their rise in the Left bastion has been checked somewhat by their complicity in the institutional backlash following the events of February 9.

Even as there remains a sizeable chunk of the student body who disagreed with commemorating the executions of Maqbool Bhat and Afzal Guru, it isn’t a given that their votes would go to the ABVP, who are seen by the majority for the fascists they are.

The thing is, they don’t need a majority to win union posts, thanks to the multi-party first-past-the-post nature of the election. Turnout tends to be around 50 per cent, and it only takes a small plurality to win — last year, Kanhaiya Kumar won the presidency with 1,029 votes, about an eighth of the electorate. (This time, with Bakr Id on September 12, there are fears students will go home for the long weekend without voting.) As a result, the election becomes a get-out-the-vote operation that rewards machine politics.

The major intra-campus political issue of this election, of every election in the past decade, is illustrative. Ever since the university increased the number of overall places offered in order to compensate for OBC reservations, there has been a chronic shortage of hostels — so much so that the JNU prospectus no longer carries the words "residential campus". There are plans to build new hostels, but construction has not begun due to environmental clearances not getting through.

Although 17 members of the union, including former president Ashutosh Kumar, went on hunger strike in January last year to demand the process be expedited, pressure hasn’t been sustained on the issue; the relative inaction, many students allege, is because all parties benefit from a patronage system, offering new admissions the chance to stay in their hostel rooms as "third roommates" in exchange for their support in the election.

Having secured a support base in last year’s polls that can be built on, the ABVP has calibrated its campaign to avoid alienating potential voters. Instead of pushing their nationalist agenda, they are running an outsider bricks-and-mortar campaign, accusing the Left political establishment of neglecting campus infrastructure issues in their years of controlling the union. (The last ABVP president of the JNUSU was television’s most annoying man, Sambit Patra, in 2001.) "A strong check on all anti-national activities" is the 11th and last of the list of demands in their campaign literature.

Top of the list is a "women-friendly campus", a reference to the Anmol Ratan rape case. The party was quick to take the initiative on politicising the incident, holding protests and painting it as symptomatic of a rape culture that pervades the Left.

One recent ABVP pamphlet features a 2008 Daily Mail article about "Stalin’s army of rapists", an account of mass rapes perpetrated by Red Army soldiers during their advance to Berlin at the end of World War II. (It’s interesting that accusing our own soldiers of rape is inconceivable to them.)

Another pamphlet, published under the name of Hastakshep — Interjection — instead of an official ABVP release (though the tortured spelling is familiar), is more direct. Titled "JNU ke vampanthi krantikariyon ka ghinauna sach . . .", the screed proclaims that four or five volumes could be filled by the rapes committed by AISA revolutionaries and lists the cases of Arshad Alam, a professor and former AISA office-bearer who was accused of rape by a foreign student last year, and former JNUSU president Akbar Chaudhary and joint secretary Sarfaraz Hamid, who resigned in 2014 after sexual assault charges.

"These leftists would spit in the face of PV Sindhu, but think nothing of defending rapists," the pamphlet goes on, accusing CPI(ML) leader and veteran AISA activist Kavita Krishnan of "fielding" on behalf of Tarun Tejpal, after rape charges were brought against the latter. (It is another matter, of course, that Krishnan wrote numerous times, both on social and mainstream media, that Tejpal’s tactics of victim-blaming and selective leaks of evidence were despicable. For the trolls, a mere assertion that the complainant has the right to decide whether or not to file a police complaint was enough to constitute support for a rapist.) It accuses her of dragging her mother into the "ghatiya debate over free sex", referring to the time Lakshmi Krishnan commented on a Facebook post about her daughter’s quote that there is no such thing as un-free sex, only rape.

To the condom-counters on the Hindu Right, the only way to stop sexual assault on campus is to proscribe interactions between the sexes. It is a security-centric approach, one that allows them to avoid uncomfortable discussions about patriarchy and misogyny.

In this case, the incident is simply a stick with which to beat the Left; you won’t find ABVP ideologues talking about the need to curb intimate partner violence and initiate the conversations and changes necessary for JNU’s culture to be truly progressive.

The "Hastakshep" pamphlet, one of many pamphlets talking about the rape, claims without a trace of irony that there is a "dangerous and uneasy silence" about it on campus.

It’s hard to find fault with the official response by the AISA; the party issued a statement expelling AnmolRatan, and wrote to the Delhi Police asking for his arrest. Three days later, Ratan was still absconding and hadn’t been suspended by the administration, and the union organised a vigil at Delhi Police headquarters and protests at Ganga Dhaba calling for his suspension. However, there are reports of AISA cadre alleging at mess tables that the girl was in a relationship with the boy, that she was paid off.

It’s not just the ABVP who have attacked the AISA over the incident. The Democratic Students’ Federation (DSF), a breakaway from the CPI(M)-affiliated Students’ Federation of India (SFI), claimed after the incident that the party and its office-bearers in the union were shielding Ratan. The request made on behalf of the Gender Sensitisation Committee Against Sexual Harassment (GSCASH) to not discuss the particulars of the case was painted as censorship.

An AISA release says that they were not allowed to hold an all-organisation meeting to discuss protest action against the delay in issuing suspension orders by a DSF representative to the GSCASH. After the meeting was called off, a DSF councillor issued a call for an independent protest. The release claims this was all part of a "script to somehow scuttle JNUSU’s protest on Monday and then immediately launch the campaign that JNUSU was 'not protesting' and 'it is only they' who are concerned about the issue!"

The DSF’s machinations are a part of its attempts to emerge as an alternative to the fading "official" Left parties. In the aftermath of the February 9 incident, they were at pains to distance themselves from any seditious activity that might have taken place, asserting the liberal pieties about Kashmir in order to attract leftist students who wereuncomfortable with discourse about the conflict straying beyond the lakshman rekha of self-determination.

It was this exchange that scuttled hopes of all Left parties setting aside their differences to face down the fascist threat. Instead of a broad coalition, the AISA is left with an alliance with the SFI, with Kanhaiya Kumar’s CPI-affiliated All India Students’ Federation and Umar Khalid’s Bhagat Singh Ambedkar Students’ Organisation not putting up candidates. (The CPI had asked its student body to contest the elections, but the AISF chose to defy the diktat in order to preserve a united front. Aparajitha Raja, who was supposed to run for president, claimed she couldn’t find her identity card at the time of filing nominations.) The DSF, which still lacks a machine to rival its bigger opponents, is only contesting for joint secretary and council posts.

AISA and SFI make for strange bedfellows, having been on opposite ends of the hustings for much of the campus’s recent political history.

In the aftermath of the Singur and Nandigram land agitations against the Left Front government of West Bengal, the AISA had led processions with the slogan, "Tapasi Malik ke balatkariyon ko, ek dhakka aur do!"

Now, their alliance with the party that had attempted to provide "a political context" for the rape of Tapasi Malik provides low-hanging fruit to their political opponents.

Another claimant for the Left vote is the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA). After a respectable debut in last year’s election, the BAPSA is contesting the elections on the plank of "unity of the oppressed", and is said to have the support of smaller parties.

Identity politics is a bugbear in leftist circles of late, and the BAPSA is being accused of jeopardising anti-fascist unity, but their critique of existent leftist politics has touched a chord. They accuse the mainstream Left parties of not allowing Dalit-Bahujans rise to their top leadership, of not fighting hard enough for the rights of marginalised communities, of being insincere in their professions of solidarity.

Like in so many elections around the world, the Left political establishment at JNU is seeing a long overdue cleaning of its Augean Stables, whilst it faces an ascendant Right. It’s a process that improves the discourse and nature of the Left in the long run, but the short-term loss of power can be disastrous.

What serves nobody, however, is to resist the cleaning of the stables in the name of unity. Win or lose, there is much introspection and action that is required if this hand-wringing about impending doom isn’t to become an annual affair.

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