DUSU election results provided the RSS, ABVP, BJP and all their supporters a reason to celebrate. In this year’s DUSU elections, ABVP- the students’ wing of the BJP’s mother organization RSS- has won three out of four posts in DUSU. It made a big comeback and emerged victorious on the post of President, Vice-President and Joint Secretary. NSUI’s Akash Choudhary won the post of secretary. The DUSU elections are considered as very crucial especially a year before general elections. They play a pivotal role in defining the mood of the nation. From this year’s DUSU election results, it is safe to conclude that the mood of the nation is still in the favor of the saffron. The attempts of the opposition parties and NOTA ‘activists’ to isolate the youths from the BJP, suffered a huge debacle as it is clearly evident in the results.
DUSU results came with a bad news for all the recent NOTA ‘activists’. In DUSU elections, the concept was introduced in the year 2016 and that year it received 12.6% vote share. In 2017, the vote share saw an increase of almost 4%. It got 17.5% vote share. However, in the year 2018, vote share of NOTA registered a decline of almost 6% and its total vote share is 10.7%. However, despite a rapid decline, it gave a tough competition to ‘Mahagathbandhan’ of AISA and CYSS. AISA is a student wing of CPI (ML) and CYSS is the student wing of AAP. Both the student wing formed an alliance to contest this year’s DUSU elections. But their alliance failed to leave any impact. NOTA received total 27739 votes and the coalition of CYSS and AISA received 29506 votes.
However, the noteworthy aspect is that since the Karnataka assembly elections there has been a massive surge in the pro-NOTA campaign. In Karnataka, on Aland, Badami, Gadag, Hirekerur, Kungdol, Maski and Pavagada constituencies the votes polled for NOTA was more than the victory margin, and except Aland, the Congress party won all other six seats. It would be not wrong to say that former CM Siddaramaiah won his Badami seat by the margin of 1696 votes only because of NOTA. In Badami constituency, 2007 people voted for NOTA which is more than the victory margin. On the Deor Hippurgi Assembly seat, the JDS candidate got 38802 votes while the BJP candidate polled 38712 votes. The BJP lost the seat by just 90 votes. NOTA got 935 votes on the seat. Similarly, in Gadag constituency, where the Congress candidate defeated BJP candidate by 1,868 votes, there were 2,007 NOTA votes. The BJP lost three constituencies– Hirekerur, Kundagol and Maski- by the margin of victory was less than 700 votes; 555, 634, and 213, respectively. In these constituencies NOTA outnumbered the margin of defeat: In Maski, NOTA got 2,049 votes, in Kundagol 1,032 people voted for NOTA, and in Hirekerur, the option got 972 votes.
After analyzing all the aforementioned figures, the cabal launched pro-NOTA campaign to damage the electoral prospect of the BJP in 2019 general elections. However, DUSU election results shows that their campaign to mobilize the youths in favor of ‘None of the Above’ have gone in vain. The pro-NOTA campaign has hardly found any appeal among the students of DU. And whatever small numbers of youth are going for this, they are not fully aware about the technicalities of the concept. The thing is that the NOTA have ZERO electoral value. Suppose two candidates, one from BJP and one from Congress fight an election. The voters however, mostly vote for ‘None of the Above’. This results in NOTA receiving 1000 votes, BJP- 1 vote and Congress- 0 votes. The fact is that the BJP candidate will be declared the winner. The one vote which BJP received shall overrule 1000 NOTA votes. If the percentage of these votes exceeds 50% in an election, the elections are cancelled and re-elections are conducted. Is this not wastage of money and administrative machinery? Moreover, if elections are cancelled, the period to conduct re-election will not be immediate. Hence, the Code of Conduct shall be extended in the state/country, which in turn will result in policy paralysis for the time period. This concept, hence, take a heavy toll on many. Being responsible citizens of India, DU students acted with responsibility and gave less audience to this wasteful concept.
