The counting of votes for the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union elections will begin on Friday night and the results are expected to be declared on Sunday, reported The Indian Express.
The first phase of voting started at 9.30 am on Friday and ended at 1.30 pm, while the second phase took place between 2.30 pm and 5.30 pm.
The posts that will be elected through the polls are those of the president, vice president, secretary and joint secretary of the Jawaharlal Nehru University Students’ Union. Candidates had participated in a presidential debate on Wednesday night, PTI reported.
The election recorded its highest voting percentage of 67.8% in years, with 5,185 of the 7,650 eligible voters turning out to cast their ballots. Last year, the figure was over 58%.
The All India Students’ Association, Students’ Federation of India, Democratic Students’ Federation and All India Students’ Federation have joined hands to form the United Left alliance.
On Monday, the Delhi High Court had put on hold an order of the university cancelling the candidature of National Students’ Union of India’s presidential nominee Vikas Yadav. The NSUI is the students’ wing of the Congress. The university’s grievance redress committee had invalidated Yadav’s candidature on September 7. He was among four students fined for selling pakodas (fritters) in February as part of a protest against a comment by Prime Minister Narendra Modi.
The other major candidates for the president’s post are N Sai Balaji from the United Left Alliance and Lalit Pandey from the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad, reported the Hindustan Times.
A day before these elections, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad won the posts of president, vice president and the joint secretary after a controversial counting process in the Delhi University Students’ Union polls. The post of secretary was won by the National Students’ Union of India.
The counting of votes was briefly suspended due to “faulty electronic voting machines and the students’ uproar over it”, a Delhi University official had said.
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