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 Only elect -
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 | | New lessons: Rahul Gandhi with NSUI president Hibi Eden at JNU |
By Soni Mishra
EM. Forster famously said, “Only connect.” Rahul Gandhi’s instruction to the National Students Union of India is, ‘only elect’. The ‘intellectual’ Jawaharlal Nehru University has always slighted the NSUI’s electoral strategy of fielding pretty faces to win elections. But when a handsome Rahul arrived on the campus named after his great-grandfather, he had a mission in mind. The AICC general secretary, who is in charge of the Indian Youth Congress and the NSUI, wants to make them fully functional. The revamping exercise hinges on elections within the organisations.
The NSUI came into being in 1971, when Indira Gandhi merged the Chhatra Parishad and the Kerala Students Union. Now it is planning to make ballots the only means to select office-bearers, instead of the often-practised nomination.
Helping the NSUI in the endeavour is the Foundation for Advanced Management of Elections (FAME), an initiative of former chief election commissioner J.M. Lyngdoh. As per its recommendations, the candidates should be 27 years old or younger, regular students of a college or university and should not have a criminal background.
“The idea is to end the nomination culture and put in place a democratic process to elect the office-bearers all over the country,” said Hibi Eden, national president, NSUI. Rahul has set May 2011 as the deadline to complete elections in all the state units as well as the national unit. The state units of the Youth Congress will have elections before that.
As a pilot project, elections have been held at different levels in the organisation in the Uttarakhand state unit. It was done in conjunction with the state Youth Congress elections. Rahul seems to be happy with the turnout and is set to replicate the exercise in other states and Union Territories.
Chhattisgarh, Delhi, Chandigarh, Kerala and Himachal Pradesh will have elections next. The idea is to start with small states and Union Territories, and then move on to the big states. “The benefits from the new system is that we are now getting a new team of young student leaders who are truly talented and we are able to build a leadership at the grassroots level, starting with colleges and going up to district, state and finally the national level. Earlier, youth leaders were imposed from the top. Now the leadership will be developed and groomed from the bottom to the top,” said Eden.
Around 25 per cent of the seats will be reserved for women. At the state level, there will be an eight-member unit, with a president and vice-president, and six general secretaries. Two general secretaries will be female and one a member of the scheduled castes and scheduled tribes.
Eden said there was a massive increase in NSUI membership in Uttarakhand, from 6,000 to 36,000, after the elections. In Chhattisgarh, there were 79,000 members. In JNU, which has 5,000 students, 1,737 were in the NSUI, he said. “It is important to note that no other party has started such an exercise in its youth units. It is like a mini general election or an Assembly election,” said Abhishek Singhvi, Congress spokesperson.
Rahul is also involved in a nationwide talent hunt to choose office-bearers for the NSUI till the elections. “Choosing office-bearers this way is better than nominating them,” said Eden, who was chosen in a talent hunt.
However, not everybody in the organisation is happy with the decision to tieup with Lyngdoh. The NSUI recently suffered a huge loss in the polls to the Delhi University Students Union (DUSU). It was largely attributed to the strict guidelines imposed in pursuance of the recommendations by the Supreme Court-appointed Lyngdoh Committee on students’ elections. A section of the NSUI leadership is apprehensive of the role being played by FAME in the backdrop of the DUSU debacle. Some of them have complained that the guidelines for the elections set by FAME could hamper talented candidates’ chances.
But Rahul apparently told Lyngdoh, while inking a memorandum of understanding with FAME, that he had doubts about the party machinery conducting the elections in a free and fair manner.
There has been criticism about the pace of elections in the Youth Congress. While Rahul has set a deadline of 2010 to complete the elections in all the state units, only four states have completed them, and the revamping exercise is currently on only in Tamil Nadu and Jharkhand. A Youth Congress leader said they were tackling the initial hiccups. “There were difficulties in the beginning,” he said. “But with every election, the process is getting better.”
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