The RSS-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP)has bagged three of the top four seats of central panel of the Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) elections on Friday. The right wing organization repeated their last year’s performance, winning the posts of president, vice president and joint secretary. Congress-backed National Students Union of India(NSUI) settled for just one, the secretary’s post.Ashwit Dahiya of the ABVP defeated NSUI’s Chetna Tyagi for the top post by a margin of over 19,000 votes.The posts of vice president and joint secretary were won by ABVP’s Pradeep Tanwar and Shivangi Kharwal by a margin of 8,574 and 2,914 votes respectively.

NSUI bagged the secretary’s post with its candidate Ashish Lamba defeating ABVP’s Yogi Rathee by a margin of 2,053 votes.

Fewer students had turned up to vote in the this year’s DUSU) election for which polling was held Thursday. The overall polling percentage was recorded at 40%, the chief election officer Ashok Prasad said. “The turn out remained low throughout the day. The political environment of DU has changed —students are not interested in campus politics as much as they used to be. Had the university not conducted the central panel and colleges’ internal panel elections the same day, the turnout could have been even lower,” DS Rawat,former chief election officer of DU, said.Last year, the overall polling percentage was 44.5% — the highest in the past 11 years.There were around 1.44lakh registered voters across 52 colleges and departments affiliated to the DU this year. The university used 144 electronic voting machines (EVMs) for the polls on Thursday.

The main parties in the fray are Congress-backed National Students Union of India (NSUI), RSS-affiliated Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP) and Left-affiliated All India Students’ Association (AISA). The contest is expected to be mainly between the NSUI and the ABVP.

The counting of votes began some two hours later than the scheduled 8.30 am, as the big screens put up on the campus for live streaming of the counting were not functioning. It is only after one of the screens was made operational then the students allowed the process to begin.