JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar, who had earlier declined to campaign in the West Bengal and Kerala Assembly polls, has now decided to campaign for a fellow JNU comrade who is contesting the May 16 ele
JNUSU president Kanhaiya Kumar, who had earlier declined to campaign in the West Bengal and Kerala Assembly polls, has now decided to campaign for a fellow JNU comrade who is contesting the May 16 elections in Kerala.
Ever since he walked out of Tihar jail, where he was lodged in a sedition case over an event on campus, Mr Kumar had maintained that he was not a politician but a student and had no plans of campaigning in the Assembly polls.
However, the 29-year-old research scholar said he had decided to campaign after Muhammed Muhassin, the CPI candidate for Pattambi seat in Palakkad region of Kerala, suggested the idea. “He has stood by me, so I decided to hit the campaign trail,” Mr Kumar said. Mr Muhassin, is a student at JNU’s School of Social Science (SSS) and is about to complete his Ph.D. in adult education. He is also the vice-president of the JNU unit of All-India Students’ Federation (AISF), the students’ wing of the Communist Party of India (CPI). Mr Kumar is the first AISF member to be elected as the JNUSU president.
The AISF vice-president was among those students who had led the agitation for Mr Kumar’s release.
“I still maintain that mainstream politics is not my calling and I have no intention of joining it. I still plan to stick to my goal of being a teacher, but with Muhassin it was different. He has stood by JNU, stood by me all the time, I couldn’t refuse him,” Mr Kumar said.
“And not only me, but the entire AISF unit of JNU will support him. Besides this, the JNU unit of the Indian People’s Theatre Association (IPTA) will also travel to Kerala to campaign for him,” he added.
Mr Muhassin, when asked about the campaigning schedule over phone from Kerala, said, “Kanhaiya along with the IPTA group and JNU students is expected to be here in the second week of May. He also plans to go to Patna before that where he will address a public meeting. He may also visit his family during the same trip.”
After the electrifying speech Mr Kumar delivered on his return to the campus from jail, CPI(M) general secretary Sitaram Yechury had said the student leader would campaign for Left parties in the Assembly polls.
However, he later stated that Mr Kumar would not travel to Kerala and West Bengal to campaign citing the bail conditions and other issues. Mr Kumar too had eliminated campaigning by saying that mainstream politics is not his calling.
In 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Mr Kumar had campaigned in South Delhi followed by Begusarai, when his home state Bihar voted last year.
