JNUSU election: Only 26.3 pc candidates for central positions are women

By Vishu Adhana
New Delhi (India), March 16 JNU elections committee on Saturday issued a final list of candidates for the upcoming student union elections and women account for just 26.3 per cent of the total candidates pitted for 4 central positions.
The students' union has four central panel positions: President, Vice President, General Secretary, and Joint Secretary. As per the election commission, eight candidates (1 woman, 7 men) have been finalised for the president position and 4 candidates (1 woman, 3 men) will contest for the position of vice president.
For the positions of general secretary and joint secretary, there are four (3 women, 1 man) and three (3 men, zero women) candidates each. Besides the four main positions, other posts include councillors for each of the schools as well as a part-time councillor.
Only 29.72 per cent of 111 final candidates for the position of councillors are women. The elections, happening after four years, will be held on March 22.
Addressing a press conference, Election Committee chairman Shailendra Yadav said: "The process of filing of nomination began on 14 March 2024. And the committee displayed the list of final candidates today. The received nominations for the president was 45. The final nomination is eight the received nomination for the Vice President was 43. The final nomination is 8. For the received nominations for general secretary 44. The final nomination for general secretary received nominations is 4 and for Joint Secretary, the nomination received 38 but the final is three."
"The total number of counsellors was 258. The final nomination for the counsellor at present is 111. Out of this 111, a total of 78 that is 70.27 per cent are men, 33 are women that constitute 29.72 per cent of the total," he said.
Since 2015, the left parties have been fighting the elections as one unit under the umbrella of the United Left.
The ABVP has also announced its candidates. ABVP said that Umesh Chandra Ajmira has been nominated for the post of President, and Deepika Sharma for Vice President. Arjun Anand and Govind Dangi have been nominated as candidates for General Secretary and Joint Secretary respectively.
The United Left representatives said that the AISA, SFI, DSF and AISF panel will field Dhananjay as the Presidential candidate, Avijit Ghosh for Vice-President, Swati Singh for General Secretary and Sajid for Joint Secretary as the left unity panel, respectively.
Since 2015, the left parties have been fighting the elections as one unit under the umbrella of the United Left.
A total of 7,751 students are eligible to vote in the upcoming students union elections at Jawaharlal Nehru University that is to be held on March 22. Yadav said that the final list of the voters would be out soon as the correction process in underway.

A model code of conduct (MCC) has been implemented in the university ahead of the elections.
Under the code, students are barred from using inflammatory remarks, wooing voters based on community, caste or religion, or spreading misinformation during campaigning.
The MCC, which came into effect Thursday night, has been implemented in continuation of the partial code of conduct effective on the campus of the JNU since March 10--a day before the election was announced. The counting of votes will take place on March 24, following which the result will be declared.
The JNUSU election is being conducted after a hiatus of four years due to the Covid-19 pandemic. It was last held in 2019.
The last JNUSU election was won by left-backed SFI candidate Aishe Ghosh in 2019.
The left students outfits had formed an alliance to contest in the 2019 polls under the banner of the United-Left Alliance, which included a coalition of AISA, SFI, DSF, and AISF.