By Siddhant Mohan, TwoCircles.net
Allahabad University Students Union (AUSU), whose election results were announced late Saturday night, now has all the key members from Samajwadi Chatra Sabha (SCS), a student group of Samajwadi Party.
SCS secured the posts of President, Vice-president, Joint Secretary and Cultural Secretary of the University, while Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) – the student wing of RSS-BJP – had managed to get the single post of General Secretary.
Avanish Kumar Yadav was elected as president with 3226 votes, while the first runner up for the presidential candidate Mrityunjay Rao Parmar has got 2674 votes. ABVP’s Priyanka Singh came to third with only 1588 votes.
While SCS won the Presidential seat with huge margins, it had to fight with ABVP’s Shivam Kumar Tiwari to secure the post of vice-president by the slight margin of 72 votes, where Chandrashekhar Chaudhary of SCS recorded the victory with 2249 votes. The third place belonged to NSUI, where Vijay Singh Baghel had to console with 1661 votes.
However, the tough fight was not only for SCS, but ABVP too had to fight hard to get that single post of General Secretary in the AUSU. It was a shallow margin of 62 votes, with which ABVP’s Nirbhay Kumar Dwivedi defeated Arpit Singh of NSUI on General Secretary’s post.
Coming over the Joint Secretary, where Bharat Singh of SCS was elected with 2051 votes. The post, where the judgment came with a largest margin of around thousand post, was of the cultural secretary. Awadhesh Kumar Patel was elected as cultural secretary with 3801 votes, in response to which, Abhishek Kumar Awasthi of ABVP secured to get only 2889 votes.
A total of 1609 votes were casted under NOTA category.
In the Union elections of Allahabad University, there was a domination of Socialist and Leftists groups. But ever since the union election in the central university was restored, it was a constant fight between socialist student groups and ABVP. Left groups lost their magic in the times when election was in idle state.
It was the union president Richa Singh, who joined Samajwadi Party in 2016, and contested assembly election on SP’s ticket from Allahabad. Richa Singh rose to fame after stopping the convoy of Yogi Adityanath from entering into the University, a time when Yogi was only the MP from Gorakhpur.
Newly elected president Avanish Kumar Yadav told media, “Now we have to pay respect to the mandate and the confidence which students have showed in us. We have to work for the benefit and welfare of the students from now.”