Now, judicial parameters for students? unions

FROM THE Supreme Court to the Union Government to the JM Lyngdoh Committee recommendations. The ball set rolling by the apex court in September last year to sanitise the immensely contaminated students? union poll process in the country seems to be getting close to the day of reckoning.

FROM THE Supreme Court to the Union Government to the JM Lyngdoh Committee recommendations. The ball set rolling by the apex court in September last year to sanitise the immensely contaminated students’ union poll process in the country seems to be getting close to the day of reckoning.

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So, there is enough reason for worry to those who invest years of energies into making it to the key posts of university and college students’ unions, which, in the past, used to be the ideal training turf for throwing up the right kind of future leadership.

However, when politics for the elderly ones has tumbled down from its earlier venerated pedestal, it could hardly be any different down the line. The younger generation, aspiring for student leadership and the clout that goes with it, has been too quick to master the crafty art of ‘successful’ politics which elders practice now with impunity and supreme ease.

So, all is fair in the battle for winning key students’ union posts—free and unbridled use of money, muscle and criminal power, as also polarisation of votes, along caste and communal lines. Inspiration and backing comes in abundance from political godfathers.

If that is so, was there anything to feel really shocked about how a hapless Ujjain college professor, Harbhajan Singh Sabharwal, recently lost his life to the angry use of muscle power by some enraged students, while he was supervising union elections on the campus? Political killings, after all, now make a necessary vice of general elections in the country. Indeed, what happened to Sabharwal was by far the first and most horrendous facet of students’ union polls in the country, much hated for many years for its multi-dimensional seamy character.

No surprise, therefore, the country’s supreme judicial institution, the Supreme Court, while hearing a case from Kerala, bared its deep anguish a year back over what has become of students’ unions. Students’ union elections have been “creating unrest on campuses” and “this is happening all over the country”, remarked the court, taking judicial notice of what is well known. “From day one, after winning the elections, student leaders unleash unrest on the campus. We have to curb this menace,” said the court.

There were several instances, it said, “when students study one course after another in the same college only for the purpose of contesting union elections, and “in many cases, the expenditure on union elections is more than the expenses for parliamentary elections”.

Against this background, the JM Lyngdoh Committee, constituted by the Union Government on the court’s directive, has now submitted its recommendations to the court to remedy the malady.

Among others, it has proposed that candidates must give a ‘declaration’ to the effect that they have no ‘links’ with any political party for ‘the purposes of elections’.

Besides, contestants must have 75 per cent class attendance, and election expenses should not exceed Rs. 10,000. Well, even if implemented, probably manipulations may frustrate these recommendations.

But what would certainly mean an inescapable thunderbolt to career student-politicians is the implementation of the Lyngdoh Committee recommendation that those above 27 years be barred from contests.

As the apex court is now slated to take up the issue any day, worries are already writ large on the faces of a substantially large number of 27-plus career politicians in the country’s colleges and universities, and they would want this year’s election process to be completed before the Lyngdoh Committee’s recommendations, particularly on the age-bar, get the Supreme Court’s judicial sanction. Only recently, pressure was mounted by some student leaders on Allahabad University Vice-Chancellor, Prof Harshe, for holding students unions’ elections soon. However, he seems in no mood to oblige them.

Meanwhile, one can only hope that the apex court’s judicial initiative for reforms in students’ union elections in the country will, sooner or later, give place to a silver lining. How things really shape will, indeed, get known only after the court’s final verdict.