The results of the student body election at Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) saw the left-unity alliance of All India Students Association (AISA) and Students’ Federation of India (SFI) sweeping all the four central panel seats of the president, vice-president, general secretary and joint secretary and most of the councillor seats.

The results have been presented as a rout of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), a defeat of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS)-Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) game plan to shut down JNU and a victory of the progressive, democratic forces. But this triumphalism only masks the deeper trends in JNU campus politics.

The campus has witnessed a steady decline in the appeal of left-wing politics over the past several years. Several factors are responsible for it. At one level, it reflects the worldwide trend of Communism or Socialism becoming a thoroughly discredited ideology. On the other hand, it reflects the changing socio-economic and political dynamic of post-reform India. At the campus level, the sharp decline in left-wing politics came about with the rise of AISA.

It is because of this decline of the Left in JNU and the rise of alternative voices like that of the ABVP and Birsa Ambedkar-Phule Students’ Association (Bapsa) that the two dominant left parties, AISA and SFI, were forced to forge an electoral alliance this time around, to avoid a certain defeat. The coming together of the arch enemies, AISA and SFI, and the outside support of the AISF and ultra-left groups itself is a political defeat of the Left. Not only have these parties compromised their political positions, but in a campus where elections used to be an intra-left affair, this fear of losing elections itself shows who has lost ground in the JNU.

The stated purpose of the left-unity alliance was to stop the right-wing ABVP from coming to power and to respond to the central government’s alleged attempts to shut down JNU. The campaign was run along the two lines of stoking parochial paranoia of ‘Stand with JNU’ by isolating the ‘traitors’ (i.e., those who disagreed with the anti-India slogans of 9 Feb) and to preserve the ‘democratic space of debate and dissent’. It is amusing that those who decry allegiance to the country as a regressive concept called nationalism were demanding unconditional allegiance to the JNU. And they were doing this by hyphenating themselves with the JNU and, in the process, crushing the pluralist voices in the campus. The whole propaganda machine of the alliance was geared towards creating a mass paranoia of ‘hyper-nationalism’ and towards what is often jokingly called ‘People’s Democratic Republic of JNU’. But just like they argue that there is not one India but many, there is not just one JNU but many. To say ‘We are JNU, Stand with JNU’ is nothing but an act of establishing a hegemony and denying democratic space to others.

Expectedly, the argument failed to cut much ice with the students. And the celebration of the decimation of ABVP in JNU is much ado about nothing. First, because ABVP has hardly ever been strong in JNU, and nor is it the ruling dispensation. The reality is that even though ABVP lost almost all the posts (barring a few), its vote share has improved. The party which used to get 500-600 votes before is now touching a figure of 1,300+ in the central panel; 1,000 votes for ABVP is the new normal.

This is a significant gain for the right wing in the campus. Barring the School of Social Sciences, ABVP now polls as many votes as any of the major left parties. This year too in one of the largest schools, the School of Languages, ABVP garnered 333 votes for the post of president while the combined strength of all the left parties secured 656 votes. And this is when the votes from the Arabic, Persian and Urdu centres, i.e., some 400 votes, go en-block to the Left, especially AISA.

In the School of Sciences, ABVP polled 341 votes while left-unity could only get 183 votes out of 793 polled this year. Clearly, the aim of the left-unity to decimate ABVP did not materialise. What it did achieve, however, was to prevent the possible victory of ABVP on two central panel seats of vice-president and general secretary. The ABVP lost several councillor posts only because of this; otherwise, its vote share has actually increased significantly from the previous years.