In Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) history is in making as far as the Left students’ movement is concerned. For the first time since its inception, All India Students’ Association (AISA) has joined hands with another party in JNU campus to fight the might of Akhil Bharatiya Vidhyarthi Parishad (ABVP). The AISA and Student Federation of India (SFI) are contesting JNUSU election together. Interestingly, All India Students’ Federation (AISF), whose member Kanhaiya Kumar currently holds the presidential post, has decided not to contest elections this year for the sake of left unity.

Being kept away from the alliance, DSF (SFI’s splinter group) has decided to field its candidate for only one position (Join Secretary). The reason for this are two-fold- lack of influence amongst students on campus and the perception that DSF has always tried to split left’s vote-bank in the elections.

The Left has in recent years been all over the ideological-pragmatic map. In the recent Bihar assembly elections, the three main Left parties — Communist Party of India (CPI), CPI-Marxist and CPI (Marxist-Leninist) Liberation — banded together and contested, not joining the Rashtriya Janata Dal (RJD) – Janata Dal United (JDU) mahagathbandhan. In the Bengal assembly elections, the CPI(M) had an alliance with the Congress, it’s traditional rival. And in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, in the Varanasi constituency where Narendra Modi and Arvind Kejriwal were running, the CPI(M) fielded its own candidate Hiralal Yadav, while the CPI(ML) Liberation student wing, All India Students Association (AISA), sent its cadre to ostensibly campaign against Modi.

On the Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) campus, the situation is like this: the 2015 JNUSU election results shook the Left. AISA, the behemoth incumbent that had won every seat in the two years prior, failed to secure enough votes to win the President post, with its Dalit base eroded by the Birsa Ambedkar Phule Students Association (BAPSA) candidate as well as anti-establishment sentiment among the general public that eventually favoured All India Students Federation’s Kanhaiya Kumar (AISF’s parent party is the centre-Left CPI), viewing him as non-partisan.

AISF is generally considered a weak party and was discredited since the Emergency days when CPI had supported the Indira Gandhi regime. BAPSA did not contest for any other central panel post. AISA managed to win the Vice Presidential and General Secretary posts, exposing the looming caste-discontent in the student community. What was most alarming for Left student parties was the rise of Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh’s (RSS) student wing Akhil Bhartiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP). It bagged joint secretary post in the central panel, clearly demonstrating how the right-wing vote remained undivided.

This year, the public has had enough of fiery rhetoric against “fascism” outside campus and the practice of petty sectarianism inside campus, especially in the light of political attacks on the entire university community from February 2016 onwards. The ordeal of February has sprouted another group: Bhagat Singh Ambedkar Students Organisation (BASO), which has no parent party, led by those who had been targeted the most during the media trial of the university, including Umar Khalid.

Initially, every party had made a call for unity. AISA made one on the third of August, titled “Let Us Reassert the Spirit of #FightBackJNU With Unity In (sic) All Fronts”. It argued, “As the attack on the very heart and soul of JNU is being intensified through numerous new means, the united spirit of #FightBackJNU must be asserted once again in all fronts, in struggles as well as in JNUSU elections.”

Students’ Federation of India (SFI) gave a similar call in a pamphlet titled, “Unity is the Need of the Hour” on August 17, without specifically using the term “electoral unity” or alliance in the piece.

Weeks passed. An apprehensive public was prepared for yet another year of factionalism, though it was sick and tired of establishment politics of fear mongering for votes.

Out of the parties, AISA has been historically the most reluctant to unite, as it enjoys the status of a pre-eminent incumbent and has the largest cadre base in the post-Lyngdoh era, in JNU. Like the SFI used to be in its dominant days in JNU, AISA had acquired a big brotherly nature. It would refuse to unite with smaller parties, thereby increasing the threat of an ABVP victory, forcing voters to vote for the biggest Left Party in order to defeat the undivided vote of the Right.

Lighting struck in the form of the rape charges against JNU student and AISA senior leader Anmol Ratan, on August 21, barely a few weeks before the elections. This raised the grave matter of campus rape in a central university that has the highest reported rate of rape, sexual assault and sexual harassment in India. This put AISA on the back foot, and gave the smaller Left parties some ammunition to band together and denounce the bigger rival. The party felt politically threatened enough to be forced to immediately denounce, condemn, expel and disown the accused. The latest University General Body meeting regarding the coming elections was overshadowed by the rape incident that called into question the most established party on campus.

The public pressure and the political backpedaling created an opportunity for AISA to give in, and for the remaining parties to use their boosted leverage. Complete Left unity, however, has not emerged as of now. Looking at the alliance that is coming up, a combine of SFI, AISF and AISA – the fourth major Left party, Democratic Students Federation (DSF), a dissenting offspring of SFI in JNU – , has been excluded. Ostensibly, the complaint is that DSF had carried a huge smear campaign against AISA on the Anmol Ratan case and that DSF’s position on Kashmir and the February #StandWithJNU movement was too right-wing to be compatible with the alliance.

The real reason, one suspects, behind DSF being excluded from a left alliance is that excluding DSF enabled AISA to demand and get two out of the four central panel seats in the alliance. Further, the move allowed its arch-nemesis SFI to wipe out DSF completely.

Further, soon it emerged that AISF was no longer part of the alliance either. The smaller left brothers were pushed aside and thrown under the bus in the name of the greater good.

JNU has a higher percentage of non-Delhi students out of all of universities in the capital. Dalit and OBC students represented by BAPSA and United OBC Forum have not been given a place in the alliance, which lack a major lower caste candidate. The Left has, over the past year, conveniently appropriated the Rohith Vemula slogans but is reluctant to bring those like him into the political process. Yet the current crumbs of a Left alliance claim to be defending and representing those very groups that they have electorally excluded.