Indulekha Aravind travels to AMU to gauge why the first women in the fray for the union’s top posts lost miserably.
Aligarh Muslim University’s Union Hall is getting a fresh coat of paint after four years. That’s how long it took the college administration to give in to the demand to conduct elections to the students’ union, dissolved in September 2007 after the vice-chancellor’s lodge was set on fire, following the murder of a student on campus. But these elections were special for other reasons, too: for the first time in the 135-year history of the university, women were contesting the top three posts in the union — president, vice-president and honorary secretary.
This sea change was brought about not by another campus revolt but for more staid reasons. Previously, the Women’s College of AMU, which has separate courses for undergraduate students and a different campus, had its own union. With the adoption of the Lyngdoh Committee’s recommendations on student union elections, it was decided to have one single union. But history cannot always be rewritten in the blink of an eye, as the results proved. The three women lost, by sweeping margins, with the female candidate for vice-president managing to garner just 50 votes in a campus of roughly 30,000 students.
The reasons for the poor show were varied. There are, of course, students who subscribe to the misogynistic mentality that “women cannot lead”. Khaleeq Ahmed, who contested unsuccessfully for the post of secretary, is among them. “Men are stronger. You can go through history and see this is true,” he says. His friends echo the sentiment. “They don’t have the ability to deal with problems,” says Atif Siddiqui, his batchmate in the faculty of law.
But other, more logical, arguments are also put forward, underlining that women candidates will not get votes merely on the grounds of their gender. “We had a 78-day protest before the administration gave in to the demand for elections. And there were students who even went on hunger strike. But there was no girl in sight during the agitation; so why should we vote for them and not for someone who took part in the strike,” asks a second-year undergraduate student and resident of Abdullah Hall (the girls’ hostel). She requests that her name be withheld, afraid that she might get into trouble with the hostel authorities. Her friend adds, “If we had a capable and convincing female candidate, we would definitely vote for her.”
Another argument against women candidates, and one oft-repeated by opponents during the election campaign, was that they are not allowed to step out of their hostels after 6 pm and hence would not be able to respond to any late-night emergency. This is contested by Naheed Mustafa, who had stood for the post of secretary. “I’m a day scholar. If there is any emergency, I would be on campus. And naturally, when I accept such a position, I will shoulder the responsibilities that come with it,” says the final year student of law.
Newly-elected vice-president Syed Omar Qadri, attired in the traditional sherwani and cap adopted by union members, is reluctant to comment on why his women colleagues weren’t able to win at the hustings. He finally says: “They didn’t have the himmat (courage) to join in the protests. Those who did fight were the ones who won.” Coming from Qadri, these are not empty words. He was one of the two who went on the 148-hour hunger strike demanding elections, possibly a major factor in him gaining 8,621 votes, the highest any union member received.
Historically, there was no ban on women contesting the posts of president, vice-president or honorary secretary, as Shakeel A Samdani, associate professor in the faculty of law, is at pains to point out. “Women were never at any point barred from contesting for these posts. It just happened that they never did.” The constitution of the union, drafted in 1952, states: “…the union is an organisation of all students, irrespective of religion, caste, creed, sex and nationality.”
Women in AMU have demonstrated their own share of ‘firsts’. The first chancellor of the university was a woman — Sultan Jahan Begum of Bhopal — and the country’s first woman postgraduate was also from AMU, an irony that has not escaped some. “It is a shame that the university which produced the country’s first female postgraduate has not had an elected woman representative for the top three posts of the union,” says Adil Hossain, a former postgraduate student of the mass communication department.
The union did, in fact, have a woman as president, though not an elected one. In 1951, Afsar Rasheed took over as acting president, though she had been elected as a cabinet member. This time, too, one of the 10 cabinet members is a female student, Maryam Zohra. This is in keeping with the trend in elections to the students’ union, where at least one girl is elected to the cabinet, says the university’s public relations officer, Rahat Abrar. Standing in front of a wall with the remnants of posters, a reminder of her recent victory, Zohra is confident that mindsets will change with time, and that deserving candidates do win. The BA final year student of communicative English, and the only one among 11 woman candidates to win a post this time, says she did not face any problem while campaigning, either. “The only boy who advised me not to contest explained that he did so because he felt protective,” she says.
Zohra was one of the luckier candidates, though. The campaigning was far from a cakewalk for fellow-candidate Mustafa. “The boys had laid plans to start hooting whenever a girl for the top three posts had to make her main speech at Union Hall. I had pebbles and sticks pelted at me too,” she says, adding that she got numerous calls and text messages from boys telling her not to contest. Mustafa, who received the most number of votes among the women (370) who contested the top three posts, also says hardly any of the male candidates followed the Lyngdoh Committee recommendations on the election expenditure ceiling of Rs 5,000 per candidate. She now plans to ask the administration to reserve one of the main posts for women candidates.
Others are more optimistic. “The girls need to consolidate their own votes; they make up 40 per cent of the student population. They must focus on political mobilisation,” says Hossein. And then perhaps, a few years down the line, an elected female candidate would sit in the president’s chair. “Insha’ Allah,” says Qadri.
