With voting for the Delhi University Students’ Union elections set for September 18 and counting the next day, this year’s campaign carries two notable twists. AISA is explicitly trying to convert the visibility it gained during the Jantar Mantar protests into votes, hoping to finally dent the ABVP-NSUI duopoly that has run DUSU for years. And a new entrant, the AAP-linked Association of Students for Alternative Politics (ASAP), has confirmed it will contest too, adding a fourth pole to what’s usually a two- or three-way race.
The nomination process gathered pace on Thursday, with 25 candidates filing for president, 20 for vice-president, 24 for secretary and 19 for joint secretary in the provisional list, ahead of scrutiny and a final list. Alongside the paperwork, each camp’s messaging has started to sharpen. ABVP says its campaign will centre on student safety and accommodation. NSUI has pitched its outreach around student welfare and accountability. SFI and AISA, campaigning jointly, are mobilising around campus infrastructure, affordability and what they call democratic functioning on campus — language that keeps the Jantar Mantar-era critique of the administration alive without naming it outright.
AISA has spent the past month running a nationwide “GenZ Rising” campaign and has folded the Jantar Mantar protests directly into its DU pitch, holding a victory march on North Campus addressed by Neha, one of the protest’s most visible faces. AISA’s Delhi University secretary, Anjali, argues the agitation drew a clear line between organisations she considers pro-student and anti-student, and says students now engage with campus politics far more readily than before. Part of that framing rests on who showed up: NSUI joined the protests after students faced violence, while ABVP stayed away a contrast Left groups are pushing on the ground even as NSUI now campaigns on its own welfare-and-accountability plank.
History is instructive here. Last year’s SFI-AISA alliance finished third and won none of DUSU’s four central posts; ABVP currently holds three, NSUI one. Both organisations are running their usual quiet, retail-style manifesto drives ABVP’s “My DU, My Manifesto” and NSUI’s “My Campus, My Manifesto” built on one-to-one fresher outreach rather than protest mobilisation. That low-key posture hasn’t cost them before: this will be the second election held under DU’s tightened rules curbing campaign displays and the money-and-muscle culture long associated with DUSU, and neither organisation’s ground network across the university’s roughly 90 colleges appears to have suffered for it.
ASAP’s arrival complicates things further. Co-in-charge Eeshna Gupta says the “Gen Z momentum” has shifted the campus mood enough that money and muscle power will matter less this year, with students wanting to discuss issues directly. Whether a fresh, untested outfit can capture that mood better than an already-organised Left alliance or simply splits the anti-establishment vote has no precedent to draw on.
A few things are worth weighing before counting day. Protest visibility and march attendance draw the already-engaged; the larger group who stayed away from Jantar Mantar cares more about practical concerns like safety, accommodation and welfare precisely the ground ABVP and NSUI are now contesting on. There’s also room for issue crossover: infrastructure and affordability complaints aren’t confined to activists, and many non-aligned students share the underlying grievance even without sharing AISA’s framing of it. Organisational depth still counts too, and with AISA-SFI and ASAP both courting the same protest-adjacent students this time, the anti-ABVP/NSUI vote could end up split rather than consolidated a four-cornered contest working against, not for, the challengers.
With nominations now filed and scrutiny underway, the contours of the fight are set: Left parties betting that Jantar Mantar’s afterglow survives contact with a broader, less ideological electorate; ABVP and NSUI betting that concrete, unglamorous pitches on safety and welfare keep working as they always have; and ASAP testing whether a brand-new outfit can actually claim the “Gen Z” mood for itself. Last year’s result suggests the binary is durable this year is the first real test of whether it’s starting to crack.
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