New Delhi: The ABVP emerged victorious in the Delhi University Student Union election on Thursday, winning three posts of president, vice-president and joint-secretary amid allegations of EVM tampering.
The NSUI, the student wing of the Congress, secured just one seat, claiming that the loss was the result of a ‘concerted conspiracy’ to bring them down. The third contender, the CYSS-AISA alliance, failed to win even a single seat.
The election results were postponed in the afternoon after EVMs malfunctioned, sparking protests from all parties. NSUI was leading on the president and secretary posts at the end of the sixth round of counting out of a total of 16 when the counting was suspended. It resumed in the evening, delivering an overwhelming result for the ABVP.
ABVP's Ankiv Basoya beat NSUI’s Sunny Chillar by 1,744 votes for the post of president. Chillar had led on the seat all morning before the counting process was halted. Shakti Singh and Jyoti Choudhary rounded up the vice-president and joint-secretary seats for the ABVP, while Akash Choudhary won on the secretary seat from the NSUI.
“We did not get votes from seven ballots out of 126 and we demand those votes be counted in,” said Laraib Neyazi, NSUI national coordinator. He accused the ABVP of tampering with the EVMs, adding that the CYSS-AISA alliance was part of the 'conspiracy' to defeat NSUI. “ABVP is behind the malfunctioning EVMs. The counting stopped multiple times and the result was postponed. This all was done to defeat us," Neyazi said.
The NSUI also claimed that the Delhi University administration was under pressure from BJP to rig the elections in ABVP's favour.
What started out as an uncharacteristically quiet morning at Kingsway Camp in Delhi — the venue for the results — quickly turned into a charged and vociferous afternoon caught between technical difficulties and allegations of fraud.
The vote count, which began at 8.30am, went through multiple intermittent halts as election officials cited technical snags in the EVM machines as the reason behind the delay.
The counting process had stopped in the morning for about an hour due to electronic display failure on an EVM. A more serious technical glitch was recorded when the EVM started showing votes for post of secretary on ballot number 10, which did not exist. There were eight ballots for the eight candidates and one ballot for NOTA, bringing the total to nine.
The DU administration admitted that the machines were faulty and halted the counting process once again in the afternoon. A few irate candidates broke windowpanes of the Kingsway Camp community centre which had doubled up as the counting centre for the day. They also attacked the police barricades around the centre.
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