Left sweeps JNU polls

By Lakshmi Balakrishnan

NEW DELHI, NOV. 13. A year after they lost the mandate to lead Jawaharlal Nehru University's student brigade by a single vote, the Left made a sweeping comeback with the SFI-AISF combine bagging all the four central panel posts and 18 of the 26 councillor posts of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union.

With the counting process being the exact replica of last year's rather nail-biting finish, it was a case of waiting for just the final figures this year with the SFI-AISF combine soaring ahead with a margin right from the beginning.

While the final results came out only by six this evening, the trend was clearly in favour of the Left from afternoon itself. If last year saw the final vote being the decider, this time the SFI walked away with a lion's share of the 3,124 votes cast.

Albeena Shakeel won with a formidable margin of 589 votes; becoming only the second woman president of JNUSU after Rashmi Doraiswamy, who had bagged the post in the 1984 elections. Although Albeena was the clear favourite from day one, the huge margin came as a surprise to many.

``It is a reassertion of the fact that the campus does not have any room for communal politics. The students have given a political mandate of a national level here. It is a mandate against the ABVP and its policies,'' the president-elect said soon after winning.

In the JNUSU for the fifth consecutive year, Albeena was elected the vice-president last year. The vice-president's post this time round has been bagged by Rohit, who raced ahead with a thumping majority of 631 votes. Ginu Zacharia Oommen walked away with the post of general secretary with 316 votes. The post of joint secretary was bagged by Parimal Maya Sudhakar who again won with a majority of 450 votes.

Unlike last year, when the posts of councillors were divided equally among the Left and the ABVP, this time 18 went into the kitty of the Left. While the combine made a clean sweep of the five councillors posts from the School of Social Sciences and the School of Languages, Literature and Cultural Sciences, it bagged three of the five seats in the School of International Studies and two of the three in the School of Computer and System Sciences. The student outfit also bagged all the posts in the School of Life Sciences.

The highest voting was reported from the School of Environmental Studies with 96 of the 118 students coming out to vote. The School of Social Sciences saw the lowest turnout, with just 941 students of the total 1,572 coming out to vote.

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