'Reds' whitewash JNUSU election

New Delhi, Sept 10: Left-unity made a clean sweep in the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students Union (JNUSU) polls on Sunday grabbing all four seats for the central panel.

In the vote count concluded in early hours of Sunday, the election office announced Left alliance’s Geeta Kumari as the President-elect for the JNUSU, who defeated the closest candidate Nidhi Tripathi of the RSS-affiliated Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) by a margin of over 400 votes.

Kumari got a total of 1,506 votes against Tripathi’s 1,042. Shaba Azmi of Bhagat Singh Ambedkar Phule Students’ Association (BAPSA) ranked third with 935 votes. Simone Zoya Khan, Duggirala Krish and Shubhanshu Kumar from Left alliance were elected Vice President, General Secretary and Joint Secretary of the students union respectively.

CPI-Marxist party’s Students’ Federation of India (SFI), CPI-Marxist-Lenin (ML)-affiliated All India Students’ Association (AISA) and an independent left group Democratic Students’ Federation had formed a coalition to fight the election jointly.

Running for the post of President, Aparajita Raja of CPI-affiliated All India Students’ Federation (AISF) could muster only 416 votes, while more students (127) chose to go for ‘None of the above’ (NOTA) option than voting for Congress-backed NSUI’s Varshnika Singh, who received 82 votes. Khan, the Vice President-elect of the union, received 1,876 votes against 1,026 of ABVP’S Durgesh Kumar, who was the second closest. (IANS)