New Delhi: For years, Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) politics has largely been a contest between two parties. The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP), affiliated to the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and Congress-backed National Students’ Union of India (NSUI) have dominated the electoral space.Left-backed All India Students’ Association (AISA) and Students’ Federation of India (SFI), along with independent outfits such as Krantikari Yuva Sangathan (KYS), which represents working-class students, DISHA and newer formations such as the Aam Aadmi Party’s student wing, have remained on the margins, struggling to match the dominant outfits’ electoral performance, money and influence.The trend is reflected in the central panel. In 2025, ABVP bagged three of the four posts, with NSUI winning the vice president’s seat; in 2024, the two outfits split the panel 2-2, while ABVP won three posts in 2023.But the Cockroach Janata Party (CJP) protest in June and July may have altered the terrain. Several of these outfits were involved in the protest, setting up camps and mobilising students. The movement brought focus on examination reforms, paper leaks, unemployment, admissions and institutional accountability, tapping into a generation’s frustration with systemic failures.Its eventual success in forcing the govt to respond has given these outfits a political momentum they now hope to carry into the DUSU polls. They are banking on the same concerns that created the protest momentum to expand their electoral footprint.A mixed electoral trajectorySFI’s vote share rose from 3.8% in 2018 to 6.1% in 2023, while AISA’s moved from 12.5% to 6.9% over the same period. The two contested as an alliance in 2024 and 2025, securing 10.8% and 11.5%, respectively. The figures are based on votes across the posts contested by each organisation and are not directly comparable across years, as the outfits contested different posts and, in several elections, as alliances.DUSU elections were not held between 2020 and 2022 due to Covid and resumed only in September 2023, creating a four-year gap between the polls.The ABVP-NSUI gapABVP and NSUI, meanwhile, have consistently commanded much larger vote shares. In 2025, ABVP candidates together accounted for 39.7% of votes across the four central-panel contests, compared with 31.5% for NSUI and 11.5% for the AISA-SFI alliance. In 2024, ABVP and NSUI were at 36.7% and 35.8%, respectively.Banking on the CJP momentFor AISA, the protest has also translated into an organisational boost. DU activist Ananya said the outfit added 6,000 new members in the first three weeks after DU reopened, driven by the “enthusiasm generated by the Jantar Mantar movement”. “This time students are posing a serious challenge to the same feudal-patriarchal money based politics that dominates DUSU. We are seeing that students are more concerned with their issues and their agenda,” she said.ASAP, the AAP’s relaunched student wing, is also banking on the protest’s politics. Its vice president Kamal Tiwari said: “When one of the biggest Gen-Z student movements was taking place, ABVP was nowhere to be seen. Students remember who stood with them when it mattered and who chose to stay away.”ASAP, which replaced the AAP’s earlier student outfit Chhatra Yuva Sangharsh Samiti (CYSS), is itself attempting to establish an electoral base. CYSS contested DUSU only twice, in 2015 and 2018, and failed to win a central-panel post. This year will be the AAP student wing’s first actual electoral test under the new banner.SFI Delhi secretary Sooraj Elamon said the organisation would similarly take the CJP-era concerns around examination reform, affordability and accountability into the election, arguing that the movement demonstrated that such issues could mobilise students beyond traditional political constituencies.But does DUSU represent the entire student body?KYS, which participated in the CJP protest but does not contest DUSU elections, offers a different reading of the electoral moment. Member of its Delhi state committee, Bhim Kumar said the issues raised in DUSU politics represent only a “small fragment” of the university, pointing to the exclusion of more than two lakh School of Open Learning (SOL) students from voting rights.With more than 90 colleges and around 5 lakh regular students, Delhi University’s electoral base is vast, but DUSU turnout has remained lower than 45% in recent years. It was 44.5% in 2018, 39.9% in 2019, around 42% in 2023, 35% in 2024 and 39.4% in 2025.
