Student leader CPM threw out back as JNU union president

V Lenin Kumar beat competitor by 200 votes to bag top post, AISA gets other seats.

It was an emotional moment for V Lenin Kumar, the presidential candidate for SFI-JNU, as he stepped up to claim the post in Jawaharlal Nehru University Students' Union (JNUSU) elections.

The results for the elections were declared on Sunday morning.

Lenin was among the four students expelled by the SFI's national leadership in July, for breaking away from party stand of supporting Pranab Mukherjee as India's President.

The four rebels were suspended and SFI's JNU unit was dissolved. Following this, the four candidates had joined hands with All India Students' Federation to form SFI-JNU.

Bagging victory, Lenin left behind his closest competitor, All India Students Association's (AISA) Om Prasad, by a little more than 200 votes. He claimed 1,445 of the 4,309 votes polled, taking over the JNUSU president's post from AISA's Sucheta De.

The "official" SFI on campus secured a total of 109 votes.

The SFI-JNU-AISF did not take out a victory procession, but "comrades" congratulated each other with "Lal salaam".

The party said its mandate reflected "what the politically conscious student community of JNU made out of the entire affair (of suspension)".

Minakshi Buragohain, Shakeel Anjum, and Piyush Raj — all from AISA — won the other three panel positions of vice-president, general secretary and secretary respectively.

AISA also won 15 of the 29 councillor seats. Independent candidate Abhay Kumar finished third with 358 votes.

In his six years on the campus, Lenin fought and won two elections. In the previous union, he was SFI councillor from School of International Studies, where he is a second-year Ph D scholar with focus on Central Asia, and had won the maximum votes for his unit.

In a statement, SFI-JNU-AISF said the mandate "is in favour of principled Left politics, which seeks to build broad-based Left unity on the basis of people's struggles and movements".

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