ABVP takes three DUSU posts as independent Deepanshu Shokeen wins vice-president

The Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad won the president, secretary and joint secretary posts in the 2026 Delhi University Students’ Union election. Independent candidate Deepanshu Shokeen, denied an NSUI ticket, took vice-president with 30,615 votes. The Congress-backed National Students’ Union of India finished with none of the four central-panel seats.

Counting ran through 20 rounds on Saturday at the Multipurpose Hall of the University Sports Stadium on the North Campus. Final tallies put ABVP’s Yash Dabas on 24,576 for president and NSUI’s Vijay Shankar Meena on 22,523, a margin of 2,053. Mid-count the race flipped. After round 10, Meena led 11,966 to 11,472. Dabas pulled ahead in the later rounds.

Shokeen’s vice-president margin was not close. ABVP’s Ishu Maurya took 16,910. NSUI’s Virr Chatrath took 4,313. Shokeen had been a former NSUI worker. The ticket denial turned him into the largest single vote-winner of the day.

For secretary, ABVP’s Riya Chhawdi polled 21,650 against NSUI’s Namrata Chaudhary on 14,869. For joint secretary, ABVP’s Lakshya Raj Singh finished on 16,641. Samajwadi Chhatra Sabha’s Vishesh Yadav had 15,778. NSUI’s Gopal Choudhary had 15,106. The joint-secretary race was the tightest of the four, an 863-vote gap between first and second.

Polling on Friday covered 52 centres. Official turnout was 40.46 percent. That is the participation number against which every claim of a student mandate has to be read. More than half the eligible roll did not vote. The union still sets the campus political weather for a year, and DUSU results are treated in Delhi as a proxy fight between the RSS student wing and Congress.

Dabas, after the result, called the win a vote for “harmony, patriotism, and the collective strength of the Sangh.” That is the organisational reading. The arithmetic reading is narrower. ABVP held the presidency in a contest that NSUI led at the halfway mark, lost the vice-president’s race to a rebel from its rival, and scraped joint secretary by fewer than 900 votes. The panel looks like a sweep. The internals look like a campus that split.

NSUI’s blank sheet on the central panel will feed an internal argument about candidate selection. Shokeen’s 30,615 votes are the exhibit. A party that cannot place its own rejected aspirant, then watches him outpoll every official nominee, has a process problem as well as a result problem.

DUSU is not a legislature. It does control a budget, a calendar of campus events, and a public platform that national parties watch. ABVP now holds three of the four microphones. Shokeen holds the fourth without a party whip. How he uses that seat will decide whether Saturday was a one-day protest vote or the start of a third pole on the North Campus.

The next dates that matter are ordinary. Hostel allocations, the festival calendar, and any police notice that touches a student march will test whether the new panel can convert a counting-hall majority into an administration that students notice. The 40.46 percent who voted have names on a sheet. The rest of the roll will judge the year by fees, safety and exam timetables, not by the slogan that closed Saturday’s press conference.