The oxymoron called "Student Politician"

In Hindi, this specimen is called a "Chhatra Neta", literally, a student politician. In reality, this person is anything but a student.

India has had strong student politicians historically, but over the years, political activism on our campuses has deteriorated into a corrupt and dirty system, like almost everything else. Only recently has this issue been given its due importance, with the Lyngdoh Committee submitting a report on ways of reforming the entire system. Ms. Mayawati, the CM of UP, has now banned student elections across the state, and the budding student activists are out in full force in most parts of the state, doing what they do best harrassing the common man and damaging public property. Hopefully, she will not budge because UP is one of the worst cases of extreme criminalization of campus politics.

Perhaps her move has a strong political motive other than simply doing good. The Samajwadi party, led by her predecessor, Mulayam Singh Yadav, has a strong base in UP campus politics. Most of its new leaders emerge from campuses of the once great universities such as Allahabad and Lucknow Universities. In fact, student politicians had a free reign during his regime.

Delhi University is one of the premier universities in the country, as well as one of the largest. The elections to the Delhi University Student Union have always been a heady affair, mostly contested between the Congress and the BJP. But recently, the fervor reached to such a crescendo that the Supreme Court had to step in to cool them off. The question they asked is pertinent: how many of these student leaders are actually students? The court said that most student politicians today are part time students and full time politicians. In fact, most of the candidates contesting university polls are way past their prime, and have been enrolled for years! I think there was a law in recent years putting a limit on their ages! I dont quite recall if it was at a state level or the federal level.

I am all for regulation of these political mavericks. One of the worst things to have happened to campus political activism is the unbridled involvement of political parties. While the poll budget for the DUSU elections are fixed at Rs. 20 thousand, it is an open secret that political parties pump in lakhs behind their candidates. Of course, college politics are also the stepping stones for future politicians in training, and they need all the training they can get in political browbeating and corruption if they have to rape the system later successfully.