The politics of our country has long been shaped by caste arithmetic. DUSU politics could have been a model of issue-based politics but, even today, its elections are swung by the “caste lobby”.

To me, the most attractive thing about DU’s red brick walls used to be their political spirit. Debates at tapris, protests against administrations, and the feeling that there I could touch and feel politics was what defined DU for me. I once imagined student politics as an accessible space. A space where any student, regardless of background, could speak, contest, and belong.
That imagination was built on the hope that education and democracy could dissolve social hierarchies, and that Delhi University, with its national reputation could be a rare equaliser. That utopian vision perhaps came from DU’s reputation as a cosmopolitan university—a gathering  of bright young minds from across the country. In some sense, it is cosmopolitan. However, its student union is anything but.

The Delhi University Students’ Union (DUSU) has become a mirror of the worst in Indian politics. It is a space where the caste arithmetic dictates tickets, campaigns, and results.DU’s campuses draw their student demographic heavily from Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand, and the political fibres of those states replicate themselves on campus. The student wings of the RSS (ABVP) and Congress (NSUI) end up mimicking the caste blocks of their parent parties. The Jat community, for instance—an influential agrarian group forming roughly a quarter of Haryana’s population—has long dominated the state’s politics. The 2016 Jat reservation agitation, which paralysed Haryana for days, showed us just how decisive their mobilisation could be. Since then, both BJP and Congress have carefully calibrated tickets along the “Jats versus others” divide. This same arithmetic plays out in DUSU, where tickets rarely ever go outside Jat and Gujjar groups.

On paper, it may seem that this student election is free for anyone interested. But to fight a DUSU election with any reasonable chance of winning requires resources, and resources have always been controlled by a few groups. Networks of village associations, PG landlords, shopkeepers, and alumni associations directly transform this caste mobilisation straight into votes. As per policy, DU has a 22.5% reservation for students belonging to Scheduled
Castes and Tribes (SC – 15% and ST – 7.5% interchangeably), a policy that frequently comes under fire from supporters of “meritocracy”.

It’s worth asking then why our student politics remains firmly in the grip of dominant castes. Not once in its history has DUSU elected a Dalit or Adivasi president. The post has always gone to Jats, Brahmins, and other dominant communities. In the last two decades especially, Jat dominance has been near- total, perhaps a spillover of their post- 2016 political assertion.

In a student election as important as DUSU, where campus news makes national headlines, representation matters. Almost every DUSU office- bearer goes on to a career in mainstream politics, and the exposure and connections it offers are invaluable. That Dalit and Adivasi students—despite being present in significant numbers—are systematically excluded from leadership is evidence of the glaring social and resource gaps that remain.

The knowledge of the overpowering sway of caste politics on DUSU has become almost banal. During the 2025 campaign, rebel candidate Umanshi Lamba told Dilli Tak that Joslyn Nandita Choudhary “isn’t a Jat, nor…a Gujjar…[and yet] she got the ticket on Jat lobbying, but now is saying she is a Gujjar. I am a Jat.”

The interviewer further continued on this line of questioning asking, “Aryan Maan is a strong Jat candidate, and you are a female and a Jat, how come you did not get the ticket?”The fact that such statements can be made openly, in 2025, inside one of India’s premier universities, says it all. DU is meant to be a representation of the brightest, most intelligent minds of India. What does it say of our character that the brightest kinds of our country are only as powerful as their background allows them to be?

The share won this year by SFI-AISA’s Abhinandana Pratyashi suggests students are not only voting along caste lines. Perhaps it was her strength as a candidate, perhaps a new appetite for issue-based politics. I used to find it inspiring to hear parties talk of menstrual leave, scrapping SEC/VAC, or defending student rights. But the politics of marginalisation, of equality, of an end to the caste system, doesn’t seem to carry much weight.`DUSU should have been a space of cross-state unity and collaboration, a place where the most marginalised voices of our student body could take centre stage. Instead, it has been reduced to a microcosm of India’s ugliest politics. Until caste dominance is broken here, DU cannot claim to represent the future of India.

Perhaps this is the sobering truth we must face: the very students who are supposed to create a more equal tomorrow have become complicit in a tragically unequal system. If our leaders here believe that this exclusion is natural, then we shouldn’t be surprised when the same logic echoes in Parliament.

Image Credits: Manan for DU Beat

Anjali Paruvu
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