Why colleges in Punjab are celebrating
CM Amarinder Singh has fulfilled one poll promise.
This past week rang in unexpected cheer in Punjab, particularly amid its increasingly impatient cohort of university and college students. After what can only be seen as an inexcusably inordinate hiatus of 34 long years, chief minister Capt Amarinder Singh has announced the resumption of student body elections in the state’s academic institutions.
Although promised by Amarinder during his election campaign in January-February 2017, the timing of the announcement was unexpected, and so has made for many happily surprised student leaders and activists across the state. “With Punjab returning to peace and normalcy, student union elections will take place regularly, as are being held in Panjab University, Chandigarh and Delhi University. We will hold direct elections”, the chief minister announced in the Punjab Vidhan Sabha, during its Budget Session, on March 27.
“Congress had promised revival of student elections. We are fulfilling the promise,” Amarinder told the house. It paves the way for union or council elections at the universities in Amritsar, Patiala, the technical universities at Kapurthala and Bathinda, and all their affiliated colleges within the jurisdiction of Punjab.
There is, however, no clarity on whether the student polls would be extended to the numerous private universities, professional — agriculture, medical, engineering, law — varsities, and premier institutions like the Indian Institute of Science Education & Research (IISER) and the National Institute of Pharmaceutical Education & Research (NIPER) — both located in Mohali.
Notably, university and college elections in the state as well as Chandigarh were banned in the wake of the rise of Khalistani terrorism leading up to Operation Bluestar in June 1984. At the time, varsity campuses, particularly Amritsar’s Guru Nanak Dev University, Punjabi University Patiala and the Ludhiana-based Punjab Agricultural University became convenient shelters for extremists, with several instances of top terrorists taking refuge in student hostels.
Some eight years later, in 1992, Chandigarh allowed “indirect” student elections and went on, in 1996, to permit “direct” polls on Panjab University Campus. But Punjab inexplicably remained aloof to the notion of student elections. The essentially bureaucratic argument against permitting politics on campuses in Punjab got a major fillip in the wake of the assassination of then state chief minister Beant Singh on August 31, 1995.
This was curiously despite the fact that no university or college campus was even remotely connect to the assassins who killed the CM in a “human bomb” attack.
A good part of the credit for the resumption of student polls must go to the Congress’s Kuljit Singh Nagra, who headed a long student agitation at Panjab University in 1992, and continued to campaign for campus polls even after being elected MLA from Fatehgarh Sahib in 2012. Nagra and other student activists have long questioned the continuing ban on student elections, decades after assembly and Parliament polls resumed (in 1992) in Punjab. The MLA is said to have played a big role in convincing Amarinder.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)