After Presidency now SFI lose JU students union over Nandigram issue

Mou Chakraborty
Kolkata, March 28
A month ago, the SFI lost the Presidency College students’ union to the political heat over Singur and Nandigram. On Wednesday, it lost the Jadavpur University arts faculty election over the same issues after eight years of uninterrupted domination. The loss will leave the CPI(M)’s students’ wing virtually unrepresented on the campus.
Forum for Arts Students (FAS), a body with an ultra-Left ideology, which made opposition to the state’s land acquisition policy in Singur and Nandigram its main poll plank, swept the election, winning 95 of the 130 Class Representative (CR) seats. It also bagged all the four panel seats of office-bearers. It won the vice-chairman seat by 429 votes, that of the general secretary by 454 votes and those of the day and night assistant general secretaries by 401 and 52 votes. Even the night assistant general secretary’s seat went AIDSO, an FAS ally. The SFI never had much following in university’s engineering and science faculties but had a stranglehold on in the arts faculty.
So complete was its sway that even last year the FAS had only a lone representative in the vice-chairman. With the arts faculty gone the SFI will now have struggle for survival.
“It is a total rout for the SFI. It reflects the students’ anger over Singur and Nandigram issue. The SFI had no voice of its own. It only said what the CPI (M) said. We worked with the people of Nandigram and Singur told the students about the injustice meted out to them,” FAS spokesperson Abhishek Mukherjee said.
SFI state president Sudip Sengupta said, “Our opponents made the sad incident of Nandigram their campaign plank. Even teachers, who had nothing to do with the students’ election, campaigned on the issue. The facts about Nandigram were wrongly represented. But we will overcome this setback.”
mou.hindustantimes@yahoo.com