Bolstered by support received from many student groups and by the factional schism plaguing the ranks of its rival union Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP), the BJP’s student affiliate, the leaders of the Congress’s student wing National Students Union of India (NSUI) sounded confident that they would break the jinx this year in the upcoming DAV PG College’s student union election.
Over the past 11 years, the students’ wing of the Congress has been unsuccessful to capture the students’ union of the biggest college of the State. This year, the NSUI leaders are hopeful that the division within the rank and file of the ABVP and support of Vikas group would help them reverse things. NSUI has announced that Aditya Bisht would be the union’s face during the election while ABVP has declared that Jitendra Bisht would be its candidate for the post of the president of the union.
The president of the State unit of NSUI, Mohan Bhandari said that Aditya Bisht would win comfortably. He, however, added that the party is not complacent and trying every means to ensure the victory.
DAV PG College is considered as ABVP redoubt as its candidates have won the post of its union’s president over the past eleven years consecutively.
The last time NSUI captured this college’s student union was in 2006-7 when its candidate Sangram Singh Pundeer defeated Jitendra Rawat of ABVP to become the president. Next year, ABVP had a sweet revenge when Jitendra Rawat defeated Manvendra Pratap Singh Bisht of NSUI. Since then the saffron union has been maintaining its winning streak in successive elections.
Meanwhile, the process of admissions in DAV PG College ended on Monday. The Chief Election Officer of the college, D K Tyagi said that the college staffers had attended the office on Monday despite its being a holiday and completed the process of admissions in semester IV and V. He further said that the nomination papers would be filed on Tuesday while the names can be withdrawn on Wednesday (September 5).
Notably, on the initiative of the minister of state for higher education Dhan Singh Rawat, the elections in all the colleges of the state would be held on September 8 simultaneously.