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The coming together of two prominent organisations in the JNU campus; i.e BAPSA and Fraternity Movement to contest the JNUSU Elections represents solidarity among oppressed identities and a call for a united struggle. Both the organisations have had a strong commitment towards fighting for the rights of oppressed identities in the University campuses and outside.
 

In times of Hindutva Fascism, the oppressed are being routinely lynched and their voices are being muffled. The current regime is that of hate, contempt and oppression. In the name of caste, religion, communalism, cultural practices, food habits and so on, marginalised groups are being targeted. There are systematic attacks on the rights of the marginalised people — the Constitution which safeguards their rights is being subverted, the Parliamentary procedures and the spirit of the Constitution have been reduced to a joke. 

This can be witnessed through the way EWS reservations, abrogation of Article 370, Trans Persons (Protection of Rights) Bill, amendments to the UAPA, NIA, etc. have been passed. A fear psychosis has been created through mob lynchings with impunity accorded to killers and lynchers as well as patronage from the current regime. Tabrez Ansari was brutally lynched. Pehlu Khan’s killers have been allowed to go scot-free. We have witnessed how 10 Adivasi farmers in Sonbhadra, UP were gunned down while they were fighting for their land.

 BJP/RSS combine has enabled, protected and supported rapists in the Kathua and Unnao cases. In such dark times where we are witnessing mass silencing of Kashmiris and their aspirations, lynchings that do not ever find justice, introduction of NRC, amendments to UAPA and the NIA act which will further place Muslims and other marginalised under the shadow of “terror”, Trans bill which violates human dignity and rights to trans persons, the oppressed need to unite and reclaim their rights and dignity themselves. 

Similar issues happening in the University campuses have also become battlegrounds for marginalised students to assert their rights. The Dalit and Muslims students on university campuses are facing perpetual threat and harassment when they ask academic questions on issues of social justice, or when they demand their fellowship. 

In a nutshell, the university space is hostile to those who are victims of face hate crimes and oppression by the state. The so-called progressive groups on university campuses have either remained mute spectators or have appropriated and patronized marginalised voices. In stark opposition to the politics of hate and mob lynching of the right-wing as well as the politics of appropriation and patronisation of the Left-wing, organisations like BAPSA and Fraternity Movement stand firm in their commitment to the politics of oppressed by the oppressed.  

We have seen in the recent past, how the unprecedented attack on the admission policy of JNU caused large sections of students to be deprived of admission on the pretext of the UGC Gazette. 

The UGC Gazette was defeated by the united struggles of students, wherein BAPSA took the lead in resisting the draconian Gazette both on campus as well as outside through recourse to legal action. 

This year, the University administration resorted to another tactic during admission, where they arbitrarily increased the intake of students to an extent that infrastructural lack and hostel availability are again threatening students, especially from marginalised communities. The lack of infrastructural and hostel facilities means that students coming from socio-economic margins will be forced to drop out of higher education. 
This year again there has been rampant discrimination in viva voce during M.Phil. and PhD admission procedures where students from marginalised communities have been given 3, 2, 1 and even 0.25 marks out of 30. These measures are nothing but different ways of targeting these students. OBC communities, while being in largest numbers, have the least representation in universities like JNU and other educational and public-private institutions. There has been gross negligence in implementing the OBC reservation in JNU faculty recruitments where the Left has been in power for over 40 years. 

The same Left parties could not play an active role, neither in finding Najeeb nor in punishing the ABVP cadres, the RSS-affiliated Students’ body, but moreover their complicity in accusing Najeeb as the ‘criminal’ made things more favourable for the culprits.

The BAPSA – Fraternity Movement Alliance is contesting in the posts of President and General Secretary as well as in School Counsellor positions. Jitendra Suna -the Presidential Candidate- is a Research Scholar at Centre for the Study of Discrimination and Exclusion (CSDE). In 2009, he worked as a helper with Indraprastha Gas Ltd (IGL) in the capital, fitting gas pipelines, fixing stoves and digging roads in case of pipe bursts. He belongs to Ganda (Dom) Caste of Dalits from Pourkela village in the backward Kalahandi district of Odisha. 

Waseem RS – Candidate for General Secretary Post – is a PhD Research Fellow at the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance. He completed M.Phil on UAPA cases in Kerala and currently working in the topic ‘Law and Literature in Novels”. He belongs to OBC Mappila Muslim community of Kozhikode, Northern Kerala. He is the first generation researcher from his community, thanks to the implementation of the Mandal Committee Report in 2006. He is a leading figure in the protests for justice for Rohit Vemula and Najeeb Ahmad. He is former National Secretary of Fraternity Movement.  BAPSA-Fraternity Alliance candidates are also contesting for councillor posts in SIS (Hirok Jyoti Ray, Praveen Bharti, Umar Faruk M), SSS (Amisha Singh, Mungamuri Kranthi Kumar, Sonali Kale), SLL & CS (Afreen Fatima) and SAA (Aakanksha Aditi) Schools.

BAPSA and Fraternity are striving to create an alternative discourse which goes beyond rhetoric and to wage struggle on the ground. Their coming together represents a step in forging a unity of the oppressed. This solidarity is based on the need to forge a larger unity of oppressed communities who are facing discriminations and oppression on grounds of gender, language, caste, race, religion, region, colour, and class. 
While analyzing the dubious Left Unity during JNUSU elections, Jadumanilion Mahanand opines that “the Left has created the binary of class and caste, and that caste is under the carpet of class. Caste is a social-political capital to perpetuate Brahminism, which in other words can be termed as “Caste Capitalism”. Jitendra Suna (the Presidential Candidate) is the real proletariat fighting against Brahmanism, class inequality, and gender justice. Only a person who has experienced humiliation and exploitation of caste and class can be a genuine and authentic representative of a movement against a hegemonic State.” 

This alliance has a historical precedence as Waseem RS, the General Secretary Candidate observed in his Debate, that “it has been developed through the ages from the mutual support of Savitri Bhai Phule and Fatima Shaikh, Ambedkar and the Muslim League, the Mandal Commission Movements, Abdul Nasar Madani’s activities, the united solidarity of Prakash Ambedkar and Asadullah Owaisi etc,.” In the backdrop of overwhelming victory of NDA for the second term during the Parliament elections, this student-level alliance will provide much more open and flexible political formulas for the marginalized communities across the Indian political sphere.
 
Author Info: Hisham ul wahab P is a Research Fellow, Centre for West Asian Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He can be reached at: hishamulwahab@gmail.com

Courtesy: Two Circle

The post Towards an Organic unity of the marginalized: BAPSA and Fraternity Movement Form Alliance in JNUSU Elections appeared first on SabrangIndia.

The alliance won all four office-bearer posts in the Union – President, Vice-President, General Secretary and Joint Secretary – by huge margins.

The victorious United Left candidates (from Right to Left): Geeta Kumari, Simone Zoya Khan, Duggirala Srikrishna and Shubhanshu Singh. Photos credit: Newsclick
 

The United Left has won a mammoth victory in the JNU Students Union (JNUSU) elections for the year 2017-18. The alliance won all four office-bearer posts in the Union – President, Vice-President, General Secretary and Joint Secretary – by huge margins.

The United Left, an alliance of three left-wing student organisations – All India Students Association (AISA), Students’ Federation of India (SFI), and Democratic Students Federation (DSF) – also won 13 councillor seats in the Union and a majority in the JNUSU Council.

Geeta Kumari from AISA won the President post by a majority of 464 votes, while Simone Zoya Khan from AISA won as Vice-President by 848 votes. Duggirala Srikrishna from SFI was elected as General Secretary by a margin of 1107 votes, and Shubhanshu Singh from DSF won the Joint Secretary post by a majority of 835 votes. The four winning candidates polled 1506, 1876, 2082 and 1755 votes respectively.
 

 Students celebrating the election victory of the United Left in JNUSU elections.

The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the student wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), came second in all four office-bearer posts.

The Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association (BAPSA), which had come second in the President post in last year’s elections, suffered a setback as it was relegated to the third position in all four office-bearer posts.

The All India Students’ Federation (AISF) was faced with a major disappointment as its President candidate Aparajitha Raja finished fifth, behind the United Left, ABVP, BAPSA and independent candidate Md. Farooque Alam. Aparajitha Raja polled 416 votes. AISF candidate Kanhaiya Kumar had won the JNUSU President post narrowly – by 67 votes – in 2015-16, when the left vote splintered with SFI, AISA, DSF and AISF contesting separately.

The Congress-affiliated National Students Union of India (NSUI) suffered serious embarrassment and a severe loss of face as all four of its office-bearer candidates finished behind NOTA. NSUI’s President candidate polled 87 votes, while there were 127 NOTA votes for the post.

Polling was held on Friday, 8 September, and counting began the same night.

The first results to come out, as is usual, were those of the school councillor posts.

Independent candidates won as councillors in many of the science schools. The ABVP claimed that two independent candidates who won in the School of Life Sciences (SLS) were supported by them, while the Congress-affiliated National Students Union of India (NSUI) said that one councillor in the same school was supported by them. An independent candidate was elected unopposed in the Centre for the Study of Law and Governance (CSLG), while the ABVP candidate was elected unopposed in the Centre for Sanskrit Studies (CSS). An independent candidate won the sole councillor post in the School of Arts and Aesthetics (SAA).

The United Left swept the councillor posts in the bigger schools – the School of International Studies (SIS), the School of Social Sciences (SSS), and the School of Language, Literature and Culture Studies (SLL&CS).

In SIS, the United Left won four out of five councillor posts, as the alliance candidates Marie Pegu, Aishe Ghosh, Sarthak Bhatia and Shashi Kant Tripathi came out victorious. The remaining councillor post was won by independent candidate Prahlad Kumar Singh.

In SSS, the United Left won four out of five councillor posts, with the alliance candidates Aejaz Ahmad Rather, Satish Chandra Yadav, Shreyasi Biswas and Sudhanya Pal winning. Chepal Sherpa of the Bhagat Singh Ambedkar Students Organisation (BASO) won the remaining councillor post.

In SLL&CS, the alliance won all five councillor posts, as United Left candidates Aditi Chatterjee, Ghulam Qadeer, Parveen Sheikh, Raju Kumar and Swati Singh won comfortably.

Counting for the central panel (the office-bearer posts) began with the science schools and smaller schools. The ABVP has been traditionally stronger in the science schools, and polled the highest number of votes in these schools.

Counting for SIS began around the same time, and United Left candidates won large majorities in the school.

As complete results came in for the ‘combined schools’ (science schools and smaller schools) and SIS, the United Left was trailing behind ABVP by 25 votes in the President post. United Left candidates in the Vice-President and Joint Secretary had narrow overall leads of 19 and 9 each. Duggirala Srikrishna, the General Secretary candidate was, however, far ahead already with a lead of 283 votes. Srikrishna, the incumbent Convenor from SIS, and whose work in the Union in the past one year has been widely appreciated, won a whopping 483 votes out of 829 votes in his school.

As results from ‘Red Fort’ School of Social Sciences (SSS) started coming in, the United Left raced ahead. The ABVP’s President candidate managed to win only 127 out of 1270 votes in SSS, historically a stronghold of the Left. Results from the largest school SLL&CS – with 1469 polled votes – were the last to be declared, and the United Left candidates increased their majorities to finish well ahead of their opponents.

The ABVP has won a majority in the JNUSU only once – in 1996-97, when it won the Vice-President, General Secretary and Joint Secretary posts and a large number of councillor seats. It has won the President post only once, in 2000-01, when the ABVP candidate won by just one vote. The very next year, however, the SFI-AISF alliance swept the polls, with the ABVP being trounced in all seats by huge majorities (the SFI-AISF’s President candidate won by 589 votes, then a record).

Ever since then, the ABVP has managed to win a JNUSU office-bearer post only once, in 2015-16. But the ABVP has been on a back foot since then, having angered the students with its #ShutDownJNU campaign in February 2016 using doctored videos. The ABVP has also been left without answers to the questions raised by students this year, as the JNU administration – widely acknowledged to be backed by the RSS – cut nearly 1000 seats in the research programmes of the University.

Geeta Kumari is the fifth woman to become the President of the JNUSU.

Rashmi Doraiswami from SFI, elected in 1983-84, was the first woman President of the Union. Albeena Shakil, also from SFI, became the second woman President in 2001-02. Mona Das from AISA, who won two times in 2004-05 and 2005-06, and Sucheta De from AISA who won in 2011-12, were the third and fourth women Presidents of the JNUSU.

The 35-member JNUSU council consists of the Union office-bearers elected by all students in JNU, and 31 school councillors elected by students of the various schools in JNU.

The number of votes cast in the JNUSU elections came down from 5138 last year to 4620 this year due to the seat cuts that have been imposed on the University.

Republished from Newsclick with permission.

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