The vice-chancellor of Lucknow University, Ram Prakash Singh, has shown rare courage in taking the bull of campus hooliganism by the horns. This university, like most campuses, has been taken over by criminals in the garb of students, patronised by opportunist national political parties.

These so-called student leaders, who are neither students nor leaders, hope to catch the attention of one of the parties, so that they may use campus politics as a stepping stone to state or national-level politics. If a student gets elected to one of the three important posts of any student union of a major university, sooner or later he or she is ensured of a ticket to assembly or parliamentary elections from one of the major political parties.

As a Banaras Hindu University student with a rosy picture of politics as an instrument of social change, I had run for the post of representative of the university’s Institute of Technology in 1985. It was a shocking experience: the candidates for the posts of president, vice-president and general-secretary asked me to align with them on the basis of a common caste, and they offered me access to any movie in town — and also liquor, if needed, for students who could pledge their votes. Having won the election, I attended the first few meetings of the union. They left me disillusioned for life about Indian electoral politics.

Students who won or ran for the top three posts did very well in their subsequent political careers. Rajesh Mishra, who was vice-president of the union, is the Congress MP from Varanasi now; O.P. Singh, who was general secretary, became a minister in the last BJP government in UP. Manoj Sinha, a former president of the union, became the BJP MP from Ghazipur, and Satya Prakash Sonkar, who ran for a post in the 1985 university election but did not win, became an MLA later.

... contd.