New Delhi: Three days after News 18 reported how student organizations, including the Akhil Bhartiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP), find littering to be an effective campaign tool, the RSS student wing seems to have made a U-turn. The change of heart has come after Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s speech commemorating the 125th anniversary of Swami Vivekananda’s speech at the World Parliament of Religions in Chicago in 1893. A day before the Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) polls, the ABVP has promised to clean the campus as soon as the election gets over.
“You have all made tall promises but I ask you this: What have you done to keep your campuses clean?” the PM asked students while talking about the Government’s Swachh Bharat (Clean India) campaign.
Saket Bahuguna, national media convenor of the ABVP, said, “We are certainly inspired by the words of the PM. A cleanliness campaign should be run all over the country. But in University campuses, we, the students, are the ones who should take the lead. In light of the PM’s Swachh Bharat mission, the ABVP has decided to launch a Swachh DU campaign. After the election, we will sweep the entire campus and try to clean it as much as we can. We have done this before also but we found fresh inspiration from the PM's words.”
Bahuguna, however, maintained that a paperless campaign was not possible unless campaign rules were changed. “It isn’t practically possible to carry out a paperless campaign in DU. Unlike other universities DU is not limited to a single campus. There are 51 colleges spread across the city. There are 2 lakh student voters that candidates have to reach out to. We practically get two days to campaign. That is the reason student activists take short cuts. We have demanded that the rules of campaigning be changed to allow us more time. After the elections, we plan to call an all-party meet of all student organizations. NSUI, AISA and all other major and minor stakeholders will also be invited to build consensus.”
An ABVP activist, on the condition of anonymity, admitted that littering was seen as a campaign tool. “Printing small fliers is much cheaper than getting a large poster or a billboard. Another issue with posters is that pasting them on the walls is time consuming. With fliers, you can just strew them across the street. You don’t even need to hand them out. Besides, there are restrictions with regard to where you can put posters but we can litter anywhere.”
An activist of the Congress student wing National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) agreed with his ABVP counterpart and said, “When a student walks from Kamala Nagar to college, he or she may not look anywhere else but he or she will certainly watch the road. The fliers are impossible to miss when you are literally walking on them.”
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