After much hustle and an almost two-decade-long break, it looks like University College, Thiruvananthapuram is finally set to have a democratic election. Three candidates of the Congress-affiliated KSU and two candidates of the CPI-affiliated AISF now have their nominations accepted.
The decision was taken in an all-party meet convened by the college's principal on Friday. Previously, the KSU and AISF had alleged that their nominations were rejected on grounds of grammatical errors. However, the principal's call was to make the scrutiny lenient.
Now, KSU's Aishwarya Joseph, Amal Chandra C and Arya S Nair will be fighting for the positions of General Secretary, Arts Club Secretary and Vice-Chairperson respectively. AISF's Nadira Mehrin will be contesting as the I PG representative and Ranin S Santhosh will be contesting for the post of the Councillor of the College Union.
The KSU will probably be moving to the court to consider its candidature for the position of the college union chairman and magazine editor. Even though the college, which is traditionally a left bastion, is facing the polls after 18 years, the students do not think that it could have an effect on SFI's monopoly there.
"Most students here are left-leaning. Our only hope is that the students who are done wit SFI's hooliganism will vote in our favour. We just want the autocracy to end," says Amal. Ranin too had something similar to say." We do not have our hopes high. We don't know how people are going to react. We think that people who are fed up with the previous SFI unit will vote for us," he says.
The SFI, on the other hand, had only one of its nominations rejected.
