DUSU election: Day before polls, parties strive to woo voters

With the DUSU elections approaching fast, the day before polling has surfaced as an interesting as well as important day in regards to the impact it has the next day. The day preceding the election is officially a non-campaigning day with no rallies and speeches, but by no means it is practiced as one, as revealed by Manav Sharma, a former student of Hansraj College who has worked closely with the college panel.

How does the last day before election pan out for the college parties in relation with the DUSU parties? Sharma said, “there is a huge inflow of money on the last day, especially in the hostels because the votes in hostels are condensed. The first year students in hostels generally vote to whom they are asked to by their seniors. And these seniors are associated with some panel or the other in the college. So the big parties in DUSU, mainly ABVP and NSUI focus on these panels in colleges and shower them with money, liquor and other merchandise.” Basically, buying off loyalties in their favor for elections is what takes place on the last day before election.

The amount of money that comes in the hostels is huge. Manav says, “it depends on the college panel leaders as to how much they can extract from the DUSU parties. Sometimes the amount can be as much as Rs 40,000 extending up to 1 Lakh or even more, depending on the influence over students the individual wields.”

So how do the hostel panelists convince other students to vote?

“The process is simple. On the last night, a meeting is called in the hostel where all the hostellers are asked to vote for a certain party and then liquor is distributed among them, seeking their loyalties for the next day. Then, a meeting of students, friends, friends of friends and distant relatives of friends who live nearby in flats and P.Gs, are called and the same process is repeated.”

What about the day scholars? How are they bought?

“Day scholars are fragmented and therefore hard to catch. So the parties (ABVP, NSUI and to some extent INSO) what they do is they look for department presidents and other such individuals who hold a grip over some group of students and cultural societies as well. You see, it’s a network sort of thing. Every individual is connected to a group of other students and what these parties do is they track these individuals and shower them with merchandise, movie tickets, chocolates, pizzas and sometimes liquor as well. And then there is the free canteen scheme as well where the canteen of the college is made free for a whole day. This is another tactic of appeasement that happens every year.”

All this information raises important questions regarding how much funding these student parties are able to secure and where is the source of it all? And secondly, student politics as envisaged by idealists as being training ground for the students to enter in the national politics, what then, does this say about the electoral practices of the country?