The Hindu : New Delhi News : ABVP to use social sites for DUSU polls

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ABVP to use social sites for DUSU polls

Staff Reporter

Elections are scheduled to be held on September 5

NEW DELHI: Perhaps in a first, the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad will be using social networking sites like Orkut for the purpose of campaigning ahead of Delhi University Students’ Union polls.

The DUSU elections are scheduled to be held on September 5.

“Since the maximum permitted expenditure per candidate is only Rs. 5,000, we are thinking of new and innovative means for electioneering. We have a community on Orkut and will be using that for campaigning. Different colleges also have communities on Orkut and they will also be utilised. We will post opinion polls on different students-related issues on the site,” said ABVP State secretary Niharika Sharma at a press conference on Wednesday.

“We are also focusing on student-to-student approach. For this purpose, we organised a pre-election campaign for three days that concluded today. For this campaign we divided our activists in different groups. The activists then went along with our probable candidates from one classroom to another with their message. We covered 44 colleges during this period,” she added.

The student outfit claims to have added 15,000 new members to its fold during its membership drive in the month of July carried out by the ABVP units at 51 colleges affiliated to DUSU.

The ABVP activists also hit out at arch rival National Students’ Union of India for not fulfilling their promises made to the student community.

“For NSUI, DUSU is just a platform for getting into active politics and for fighting elections for the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and the Delhi Assembly. In the past two years, DUSU has done nothing worthwhile for the students,” alleged ABVP media coordinator Atif Rasheed.

Probable candidates

The probable candidates from the ABVP for this year’s DUSU polls are: Vasu Rukhar, Ashutosh Shrivastava, Dharmendra, Anupriya Yadav, Nupur Sharma, Mukesh Shukla and Varun Singh Chauhan.

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