By Nanditha S
The Delhi University Students’ Union election of 2026 was not a routine campus setback. It was a public autopsy of the Congress’s student politics. For the first time since 2015, the National Students’ Union of India drew a blank on all four central posts. ABVP took President, Secretary and Joint Secretary. An independent who had been pushed out of the NSUI panel took Vice-President with the highest tally of the night. That is not bad luck. That is organisational failure written in votes.
Independent political observers are not being coy. The duo responsible for the dismal show — the party’s student-wing in-charge and the general secretary who owns organisation — must be held to account and removed. Rahul Gandhi is reported to be furious. A review has been ordered. Reviews without removals are theatre. The numbers already wrote the charge-sheet.
ABVP’s Yash Dabas won the presidency with 24,576 votes against NSUI’s Vijay Shankar Meena on 22,523 — a fight Congress could have won if its own house had not been at war. The Secretary’s race was lost cleanly. The Joint Secretary’s race was lost by a few hundred votes while a rebel denied an NSUI ticket finished second. The Vice-President’s contest was not a contest at all. Deepanshu Shokeen, refused the official ticket after years in the organisation, polled 30,615 votes. ABVP’s candidate managed 16,910. NSUI’s official nominee finished with 4,313. The official Congress candidate was not even the alternative. He was an afterthought.
That single result is the thesis. A ticket-denied NSUI worker beat the party’s chosen name by more than seven times the official candidate’s vote. The winner has since said what the high command will not: the in-charge should take responsibility; he was not on the ground; he did not test who was actually prepared. Party sources have already described Shokeen and Vishesh Yadav as members forced into rebellion “to please certain leaders.” That is the sleeper cell — not a conspiracy imported from outside, but a faction that treats the student wing as a parking lot for patronage and then acts surprised when the campus votes for the person it actually knows.
Congress will talk of malpractices and counting complaints. Fine. Even if every allegation is granted, it does not explain why the official Vice-Presidential candidate collapsed into irrelevance while the man the organisation discarded became the biggest vote-getter in the election. It does not explain why the presidential race flipped after a one-vote lead in mid-counting. It does not explain why rebels and the Left together ate the anti-ABVP vote that NSUI was supposed to harvest after months of youth outreach and “Chhatron Ki Goonj.” A campaign that cannot convert protest energy into tickets, discipline and a united panel is not a campaign. It is a photo-op.
The duo responsible for the dismal show was meant to turn visibility into organisation. What they delivered is a first-in-a-decade wipeout and an internal revolt against the way tickets were cut. If candidate selection, rebel management and campus command collapse on their watch, the posts are the problem. Keeping both men in place after this result tells every district student unit the same thing: loyalty is optional, tickets are negotiated upstairs, and failure has no cost.
DUSU has always been a rehearsal hall for national politics. Congress used to understand that. This time it fielded a panel that looked like a compromise among families and in-charges, then watched a bus conductor’s son — the same profile the party claims to champion — walk out and win without it. If that does not force introspection, nothing will. Remove the duo responsible for the dismal show. Or admit that the sleeper cell is not a rumour. It is the organisation.