Building ABVP in Raisoni Campus - Chapter I – The Year of Inexperience (2013 – 2014)

     Coffee shop, is the place where the first ABVP meeting was scheduled at 4pm. Two second year engineering students, me and Mahesh, were working hard to inform other students. Mahesh had an experience of ABVP activism in his diploma college in Beed. I had completed just one year working as an ABVP activist. My previous college, AISSMS Polytechnic was not a smooth experience for me building an ABVP unit there, as multiple experiments failed. I was nervous about starting ABVP activities in Raisoni Campus as it had no previous history of ABVP work and it was situated 15km away from the central city, where most of the ABVP strength was concentrated. Luckily, I met Mahesh and we decided to call a meeting to introduce ABVP to other students. We both were working hard to inform as many students as possible. Open campaign did not seem to be feasible to us as the college management had banned student organizations due to repeated nuisance from MNVS and NSUI. Along with that, the large local students supporting MNVS did not allow any other student organization to function. We thought of going low-profile in the beginning to avoid trouble from our counter-parts.

    Finally the day arrived. We both met some time before to discuss the proceedings of the meeting. Mahesh decided to conduct the meeting, while I would be looking after the seating arrangement, distribution of pamphlets and collecting names and contact details of those attending. At 4pm, we both waited patiently for students to assemble in-order to start the meeting. After half an hour of waiting, we realized that only two of us would be attending the meeting as nobody turned up. We both were disappointed. Mahesh was disturbed on the fact that we had no previous history of activities in the campus, hence ABVP holds no significance in the college. I feared that he may ask me to drop the plan of starting an ABVP unit in the college. But, that day the meeting lasted till 6pm. We discussed every aspect that could come as hurdles in our work, and finally came up with a plan to first approach few students and make them understand ABVP and then go forward for a campus meeting.

    Immediately on the next day, the mission began. We created a Whatsapp group where we would add students once they are willing to join us. We would meet in the break time and report to each other about the previous day’s response. We had convinced a few and now decided to find students who could take the leading role in the campus unit. We were lucky that Nikhil, who was our senior and common friend along with being the NSS co-ordinator decided to support us. We started with informal get-togethers where we would discuss about activities of ABVP being carried out of in the city. We tried taking students with us to attend ABVP events organized in the city which helped them understand ABVP better.
    The second breakthrough was our class-rooms. I was part of a huge group in my class who were diploma holders. The group created informally to have fun turned into a formal group where we would help each other in English as most of us were bad in speaking English. Along with that, we would have discussions on current topics in our class-room whenever lectures were called off. Being an ABVP activist gave me an edge in terms of knowledge and I ended being the moderator each time. Slowly, we started discussing ABVP ideology and the need for reforms in education system along with the struggle against commercialization of education. We started discussing problems in our department and would inform our Head-of-department (HOD) to get it solved. After about 6 months, my best friend Rupesh formally joined ABVP and same was the case with Mahesh who was able to convince his friends to join ABVP. This same group would be part of something that would create history two years later.

    Meanwhile, I was told by an ABVP activist to meet his friend who was studying in our college. This is how I met Kapil. We had a very informal introduction of each other. In the first instance, I thought that he could be in the leading team of the campus unit, so I would meet him often. We would have discussions on non-ABVP topics and this made me to think that he was not interested in the organization. But, I would be proven wrong after two years. Anyways, we had a team ready for our first activity in the college, which was a formal study circle. I insisted on announcing the campus unit in the study circle, but as all except me were of the other opinion, our collective decision was to postpone it. The study circle went on smoothly, but got ABVP’s growth highlighted by our counterparts working in the college i.e. the MNVS. The main reason behind this was the discussion in our study circle on the issue of ‘late-fine’ that was charged on the college fees if the student would not pay the entire fees which would be around Rs. 1 lakh in the starting month of the academic year. While most of us saw this as a serious issue, we were unsure about the legalities about it and there was no mass opposition to this ‘late fine’ which could go up to Rs. 10,000!

    Our discussion prompted MNVS to call for protest against the ‘late fine.’ The next day there were huge banners outside the campus asking for students to support. Some of us in our team were skeptical about the protest as it was a student wing of a political party and thus they wanted ABVP to stay neutral. We decided to wait to see the unfoldment of the protest. On the day of protest, there was unrest amongst the students as police vans arrived outside the campus. Some students skipped lectures to stand near the gates to see the protest demo. I was one amongst them. Nearly, two hours after the scheduled time, MNS party workers arrived at the gate and started their protest. Apart from the local MNVS unit, other students were missing from the protest. Maybe, they feared the college management who had asked every professor to stand at the gate to identify students who would take part in the protest. I was shocked to see the scenario as no student joined the protest and the protest failed miserably.  This lead to the decline of the influence of MNVS in the campus. It also affected ABVP as the general perception about student organizations became negative. Students who had joined ABVP started drifting away as they feared that the college administration is keen to play vendetta politics against student activists.

    In the last months, we decided to change our strategy. We started to make use of posters to convey our message. We started highlighting the issues that students were facing. In-order to attract different categories of students, we identified three notice-boards in the college where we would stick bulletins of ABVP which would have information about upcoming activities and awareness about social issues. As the year came to an end, we failed to declare our campus unit and could only organize a single event, but we were successful in introducing ABVP to a large number of students. Also, ABVP had started to gain acceptance as a platform which could help students to know about current affairs of the society. We were disappointed of not being able to complete our plans, but were excited for the coming year.

We had learned a lot with our experiments and were happy to try out-of-the-box things and gain experience in the art of building an organization! Our unit would be a representation of the students, hence it was very important for the students to have the exact idea of our intentions. This philosophy was rooted deep in our minds. Along with this, we encouraged each other to be regular in attending lectures as we did not wanted us to be seen as someone who could not fulfill the core responsibility of being a student. For a unit to flourish, sharing and understanding each other as friends, helped us as we had negative experiences every alternative day.  We tried to participate as much as we could in the college events to introduce ABVP. Each one of us wanted the other to work upon a skill which could help us in conveying our thoughts. Most of the plans remained on paper, but the hope that this could be executed the next year gave us hope. We lacked experience at the beginning, but we gained experience which would help us a lot in the coming two years. We regret our fewer efforts, but our commitment and pure intentions would result into this unit being part of history two years later.

This article is a part of three-article series. You can find the second and the third one by clicking the below link:

Building ABVP in Raisoni Campus - Chapter II – The Year of Struggle and Learning (2014 - 2015)

Building ABVP in Raisoni Campus Chapter III – The Year of Total Revolution संपूर्ण क्रांति (2015 - 2016)