“Chetna Tyagi baari adhyaksh pad ke ummeedwar ho, bijoi banahiye milke UP-Bihar ho (Chetna Tyagi is the presidential candidate this time, all of you from UP and Bihar come together to make her win),” goes the campaign anthem for National Students’ Union of India's (NSUI) Presidential candidate for this year's Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) elections on September 12.
Chetna is the first Purvanchali presidential candidate of the NSUI and they have outdone themselves with the campaign this year. The student body of the Indian Nation Congress has got Bhojpuri singer Hemant Harjai, an ardent supporter of PM Modi, to sing the song for them. He has previously recorded several songs in praise of Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the Lok Sabha polls, and is a self-declared “Modi bhakt”. Hemant said that he got to know Chetna as she was related to a friend of his, and did not charge a single penny for it. Hemant said he wanted Tyagi to win DUSU, but nationally he supports Modi: “I have written 5-7 songs about him which are on YouTube, and I did it for free. I am a Modi bhakt…” he told The Indian Express.
In the roughly two-minute clip doing the rounds on WhatsApp, Hemant asks students to vote for ‘Purvanchal ke beti’ Chetna in the DUSU elections to “bring pride” to the region, reported The Indian Express. NSUI national media in-charge Neeraj Mishra said, “We contacted Harjai as he is close to one of our state presidents. Chetna’s maternal side is from UP’s Faizabad, which is in the Purvanchal belt. Since this is the first time we are fielding a Purvanchali candidate on the post of president, we adopted this (song) as a strategy.” He said the last time NSUI fielded a Purvanchali candidate was Karishma Thakur in 2013, but that was for the post of secretary. She was the only NSUI candidate to win that year.
“Since DU’s inception, people from Eastern UP and Bihar have been coming to DU. This song is specifically made keeping them in mind,” he said. “This is not about regionalism; a linguistic approach is taken by all political parties to connect with people. We are also using this linguistic tool,” added Neeraj.
