New Delhi: Even as the four student bodies campaigned intensively ahead of the Delhi University Students Union (DUSU) polls on Friday, it wasn't enough to attract a vast majority of the almost 1 lakh eligible voters of the university to the ballot boxes.
The voting to elect the representatives of Delhi University Students Union (DUSU) included several new parties like All India Students' Association (AISA), Students' Federation of India (SFI) along with BJP-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), and the Congress backed National Students' Union of India (NSUI).
Also, a few Northeast students' parties fielded their candidates.
Pamphlets could be seen scattered everywhere along the roads of Delhi University's North Campus as the polling kick-started at 8:30 in the morning.
As the candidates waited in anticipation expecting huge turnout, the small queues reflected their campaign had lacked a mass appeal and failed to pull crowds to the polling centres.
"The manifestos are all similar and these elections don't fetch us any good," said Akshay (name changed), a SRCC student who opted for NOTA, an option the election authorities introduced in the DUSU polls for the first time this year.
Among those who voted, many were not even aware of the parties' manifestos.
"We are freshers and we don't know the candidates and their work. We voted as we were advised by our seniors," said a group of first year students from Ramjas College.
Meanwhile, Mithla, who is an Asmeese student from SRCC, said that the student union can be important to showcase the democratic values of University but to normal students who have migrated to Delhi for studies, these polls hardly make a difference.
While all the parties tried to take credit for the success of the controversial four year undergraduate programme (FYUP) being scrapped, AISA expected to gain the most from the influence they thought they have made with their protest against FYUP in the past one year.
In any case, both ABVP and NSUI, the two student parties which have been in this poll game ever since the DUSU elections started in 1954, stole the show yet again as maximum number of voters said they voted for one of these two parties.
Among the two, ABVP seems to have an upper hand for two reasons: They already bagged three out of four seats in 2013 qand already have a winners' track record and secondly, it expects to clean sweep DUSU polls riding on the Modi-wave that led their national party BJP to victory in the recently held Lok Sabha polls.
Meanwhile, AISA and other new entrants failed to make any presence felt as voters were not even aware of their names or the name of their candidates.
In total, there were seven candidates in the fray for the post of president, 32 for the post of vice president, 41 for secretary and 34 for the post of joint secretary of the students' union.
The main agenda during the DUSU elections this year were hostel accommodation, discrimination of the Northeast students studying in Delhi University among others.
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