As soon as the gates opened at 8.30 am for polling at the Delhi University for its student union election, various parties were seen hooting their party’s ballot numbers and making sure that they were the ones who were voted for. While officially they were not allowed to do so, they adopted various techniques to get their message across. Be it whispering ballot numbers in ears of students walking in or at random shouting out numbers, unions managed to get the students to pay heed to their campaigning.
At the entrance of all colleges in the North Campus, student representatives were seen walking up to students in an attempt to help them with the election process but actually asking them to vote for the ballot number of their party. Members of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) were the most commonly seen. Without fault they walking up to every student and asked them to vote for Mohit Nagar, their presidential candidate.
Members of the National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) were not far behind, as they were seen mingling with the crowd asking students in a discreet manner to vote for Gaurav Tushir. The volunteers would walk past a student and craftily whisper the candidate name and ballot number in the person’s ear. With NSUI’s ballot numbers for the four seats of DUSU being 1,212 and ABVP’s being 2,141, the unions were repeatedly seen chanting these numbers at colleges. While they did all of this to grab the attention of voters, they also randomly broke into cheers of a particular number.