Lalu’s RJD owns JNU president debate, ABVP booed by NE students

NEW DELHI: The politically charged debate among the presidential candidates for the students’ union at Jawaharlal Nehru University on Wednesday night was punctuated by protests and frequent sloganeering. This meant that the event, usually over in two hours, turned into an affair that lasted five-and-a-half hours. The orators not only took up campus issues, but their speeches circumscribed national politics too.


Around 9pm, when the debate, unique among universities in India, was to begin on the lawns at Jhelum hostel, visually challenged students demanded that the debate be made more inclusive and the election committee accept their questions and respond in Braille. It took three hours for the EC to relent and it was only around midnight that the eight candidates were able to start talking of their agendas for the JNU of their dreams.

The tone was set by Praveen Thallapeli of BAPSA (Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association), who positioned his party against all others as the only one that fought against every kind of oppression. Attacking the Left not fighting the university administration on key issues, he said, “When BAPSA was struggling against the seat cut, the Left was running away from the 100m.” The reference was to the rule preventing protests within 100 metres of the administration building.

Thallapeli also took on ABVP, and its association with the central government, and smirked, “When they were getting the seats cut in the university, approvals were being given to Whatsapp University, Jio University.”

In a contest broadly expected to be among ABVP, the leftists and BAPSA,

Left Unity

candidate N Sai Balaji employed national politics to attack the right-wing party. “Mobs are allowed to kill people and get away with it because they have the backing of RSS, the central government and Prime Minister Narendra Modi. The country has been turned into lynchistan,” he alleged.

Left Unity — an alliance of AISA, SFI, DSF and AISF — was itself the target of every rival. While BAPSA claimed that the unity was achieved only on the day of the nominations, ABVP’s Lalit Pandey attacked it for being an opportunistic grouping solely created to oppose his organisation.

Pandey himself faced protests when he stood up to speak. Northeast students hooted him and demanded an apology from his outfit for not allowing them to meet chief ministers of three north-east India states ABVP had invited to an event at the university. Verbal scuffles broke out when ABVP supporters accused the protestors of violating Pandey’s right to speak.

“Your slogans cannot silence me. Nor can they deter me,” Pandey retorted, and then played the nationalism card: “If there are any slogans about breaking up the country, we will protect India from Kashmir to Kanyakumari.”

It was the Jayant Kumar, candidate for the Chhatra Rashtriya Janata Dal, who delivered received the most applause for his taunting sallies at the rivals. He attacked both the Left and Right for their policies, and toeing his party line, struck a blow for reservations while accusing the central government of diluting them. “The policy has changed the lives and the opportunities available to Dalits, adivasis and backward castes. But neither the Left nor the Right are fighting for their cause,” he said.

Kumar also sneered at the Centre, obliquely referring to its stand on the Kerala floods, saying, “Whenever there is a disaster, pamphlets appealing for funds are distributed. Yet substantial foreign aid is rejected and just Rs 500 crore is dispatched as help instead,” he said.

The

presidential debate

was the last chance for the candidates to win the support of JNU’s students, with voting slated for Friday and the results for Sunday.