After receiving kudos for his efforts to “democratise” the Youth Congress through inner-party elections, AICC general secretary Rahul Gandhi is now out to revamp the party’s student wing — National Students Union of India (NSUI).
Gandhi is working on a revamp model with Foundation for Advanced Management of Elections (Fame), the NGO run by former chief election commissioners (CECs) JM Lyngdoh and N Gopalaswamy and former election commissioner KJ Rao. Fame had helped him improvise election procedures for Youth Congress units in Gujarat, Daman & Diu and Puducherry.
Party sources said the “democratisation” process for NSUI would begin with state and union territory units and culminate in polls for the national unit. Being a student body, the maximum age to qualify for NSUI polls is 27, against 35 for Youth Congress polls.
There will be more office-bearers for NSUI polls, with quota for SC, ST and women.
An AICC functionary said, “We are working on a model where state NSUI units would have an eight-member panel comprising the president, vice-president and six general secretaries. Two of the general secretaries would be women, and one would be from the SC/ST community. Members and office-bearers must keep in mind that we are a party of the aam aadmi. Their conduct must reflect this.” Models for the district and block levels would also have quotas for women, SCs and STs.
Some NSUI sections have expressed concern over “unreasonable” guidelines by Fame and the Supreme Court-appointed JM Lyngdoh committee on student union polls. “Mr Lyngdoh and others have an incredible track record in managing elections, but some of their recommendations may curb good talent from coming up. It was because of such unreasonable recommendations that NSUI candidates got disqualified from the Delhi University Students Union polls this year,” a Delhi unit office-bearer said.
Senior NSUI office-bearers, are, however, hopeful the initial hiccups will end soon. “There were problems with the Youth Congress polls initially, but a better system evolved with every new state where polls were held,” national general secretary Anand Pandey said.
