ABVP bags DUSU president post by margin of over 19k votes, highest in 20 years

The RSS-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) won the Delhi University Students Union president's post by a margin of over 19,000 votes, the highest in almost two decades.

The outfit, however, claimed that the victory margin was the highest in almost 50 years.

"This is the first time in 50 years that the victory margin has crossed over 19,000 votes for the president's post.

"Arun Jaitley ji had won the president post in 1974 by a margin of over 10,000 votes. Akshit Dahiya, who has won the president post by a margin of over 19,000 votes is the youngest candidate to win it. He is just 20 years old," Shri Niwas, the national joint secretary of the student outfit, told PTI.

Dahiya, a first year law student, got 29,685 votes and trounced NSUI's Chetna Tyagi by a margin of 19,039 votes to bag the top post of DUSU.

Last year, ABVP candidate Ankiv Basoya, who was later disqualified after it was found he had allegedly submitted a fake degree, had won the post by a margin of 1744 votes. In 2017, NSUI had bagged the post by a margin of 1,590 votes whereas in 2016 and 2015, the ABVP won the post by margins of 4,664 and 6,327 votes respectively.

The RSS-affiliated students' outfit had won the DUSU president post in 2014 by a slender margin of 914 votes and in 2014, the margin was 1,533.

In 2014, Ashish Mathur of ABVP had won the post of joint secretary by a margin of over 11,800 votes, the ABVP said. In 2011 and 2012, the Congress' student wing NSUI had bagged the post by margins of 2,362 and 5,465 respectively.

The last time the victory margin for the DUSU president post crossed the 10,000 mark was in 2003, when NSUI's Rohit Chaudhary had defeated his ABVP rival Shital Sharda by a margin of of 12,951 votes. In the same year, Ragini Nayak had bagged the secretary's post by defeating her rival with a huge margin of 15,600 votes.

In 2000, NSUI's Neetu Verma had defeated her ABVP rival by a margin of 13000 votes to become the vice president of the university student's union. The next year, she bagged the president's post after winning with a margin of 7,609 votes.