Now, college unions on Mamatas radar

Updated on: Wednesday, November 11, 2009

Trinamool Congress is pushing ahead with a plan to set up the party students’ wing in colleges before the union elections scheduled to take place from December to March.

This is being seen as a crucial move to strengthen Trinamool’s base in the runup to the 2011 assembly elections. The first step in that direction was taken on Monday, when Trinamool Congress

Chhatra Parishad (TCCP) started a unit at the iconic Presidency College, the hotbed of Left politics for decades.
Instructions have gone out from Mamata to the TCCP leadership to get its act together so that the maximum number of students can be inducted during college union elections. The party is ready to tread new ground with this move as it is planning to fight for a place in a number of colleges in which it has no presence till now.

In many of these colleges, CPM students’ wing SFI will be TCCP’s arch-rival, while in others it will have to face the students’ outfits of Congress and SUCI. Though Trinamool has a tie-up with Congress and SUCI at the state level, the party plans to go it alone in the colleges. An alliance will be considered only when absolutely necessary.

Sources said the Presidency move was planned by none other than Mamata herself. The announcement came just after she had publicly demanded upgrade of the college to autonomous institution, a decision the Left has sat on for years. The other institutions where TCCP has just started units are Manindra Chandra College, Dinabandhu Andrews, Calcutta University (College Street campus), Hazra Law College and South City College.

“We have already identified the colleges where we need to open our units immediately. We have taken this call on the basis of a survey we have been conducting for a year now. The results of the survey show that we have ample support among students of Ballygunge Science College and the BT Road and Alipore campuses of Calcutta University apart from several medical and tech institutions, where students have been inviting us to start units,” said Partho Pramanik, a core committee member of both Trinamool and its students’ wing.

Students of three medical colleges — Calcutta Medical College, National Medical College and Nil Ratan Sircar Medical College — have reportedly been urging the TCCP leadership to start units there and this may happen by the end of the month. The party has been thrashing out an understanding with the existing unions at Bengal Engineering and Science University (Besu) and the Jadavpur University — two prestigious campuses that have remained outside SFI’s clutches for some time. “Initially, the Independents Consolidation at Besu was prepared for an alliance but that hasn’t materialized yet. We should be entering JU by the beginning of 2010. We will start with the arts faculty,” Partho said.

Among the colleges where the TCCP runs unions are City College (Rammohun Roy College), Victoria Institution, Jogesh Chandra Law College, Jogamaya Devi College, Bangabasi College (commerce section) and Rafi Ahmed Dental College. In the first three, TCCP had routed SFI at least seven years ago while the Bangabasi union fell in the party’s lap by default.

Now, college unions on Mamatas radar

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