Furious that campus elections had been postponed, students of Madhav College, Ujjain went on a rampage in 2006. In the melee, H.S. Sabharwal, who taught political science, was kicked off his scooter, then beaten to death, allegedly by student leaders linked to the BJP — all to the unblinking gaze of television cameras. The Supreme Court cited Professor Sabharwal’s murder when it accepted the Lyngdoh Committee recommendations on regulating student elections.

The Committee, headed by a former chief election commissioner, has courted controversy over two minor details: reducing the maximum age of candidates, and limiting expenditure to just five rupees thousand per candidate.

But the bigger worry is the report’s aim to reduce the role that big political parties play in student elections. The report blamed party-backed student groups for the “tendency... to unnecessarily politicise the election process.” As a result, virtually all party-backed student groups — the NSUI (Congress), the SFI (CPM) and the ABVP (BJP) — were in effect debarred from standing in the recently-concluded Delhi University Student Union elections. This was also why, when the votes were counted, an ‘Independent’ had won.

Lyngdoh’s assumption that for student politics to be clean, it must be divorced from party politics outside, is shared by many in the middle class: the belief that representation is best done by “small” tightly-knit groups, that large political parties, venal and authoritarian, somehow sully it. It is part of the American romance with “town-hall” politics, the same romance that glorifies consensual decision-making in panchayati India.

... contd.