There was palpable tension in the Communist Party of India–Marxist (CPI-M) headquarters in central Kolkata on Thursday night. Party’s top leaders were monitoring students’ union election at the Presidency University, where the outcome has often decided the course of State’s politics.
And on Thursday night, the Student Federation of India (SFI), the student wing of the CPI (M), won comprehensively in the Presidency, after nearly a decade. A year before the CPI (M)-led Left Front lost power in Bengal, the SFI formed the students’ board in Presidency University in 2010.
On Thursday they bagged all the five posts of president, vice-president, general secretary, assistant secretary and secretary of girls’ common room, in which election was conducted. In all the posts, the SFI candidates defeated a students’ platform Independent Consolidation (IC) candidates.
State Secretary of the CPI(M) Surjya Kanta Mishra congratulated the winners and tweeted that consolidation of “the unity of all Left Students Organisations shall continue to be the foremost agenda as ever.” Earlier Mr. Mishra also tweeted that from “Jawaharlal Nehru University to other campuses in the country the SFI is raising its voice.”
Students, waiting for the result of class representative councils, after the SFI registered a massive victory in the Central Panel Elections of the Presidency University in Kolkata on Friday. Photo by / The Hindu.
SFI leader Manjima Dasgupta told the journalists that the key reason for the defeat of the IC was because they failed to respond to several allegations related to gender issues.
Allegedly, the IC office-bearers did not respond to repeated sexual harassment charges on the University campus.
The IC, which defeated the SFI a decade back, acknowledged that they “could not respond properly to women students’ issue on the campus.”
