Nalsar Hyderabad elected its first ever female Student Bar Council (SBC) president last month in the first ever direct presidential elections at the law school.

Final year student Sneha Vardhani is not only the Nalsar SBC’s first female president, but is one of only four women in 13 years of Nalsar student politics to have held executive posts in the SBC, outside of female quotas introduced this year in the body.

Other than Vardhani, SBC 2014-2015 treasurer Veena Raghav, SBC 2012-2013 joint secretary Bidya Mohanty and SBC 2005-2006 general secretary Priyanka Dahiya are the three female students to have been SBC executive members, as confirmed to Legally India by student sources at Nalsar.

In the 2014-15 SBC two new executive posts were reserved for women – the general secretary (female) occupied by Arti Mohan and the joint secretary (female) occupied by Deeksha Singh.

Four out of seven SBC executive members this year are women, while two out of eight SBC sub-committee convenors this year are also women.

In addition to direct presidential elections, presidential manifestos and female leadership, this year’s general elections also introduced representation for Nalsar’s LLM students in the SBC, and created a new SBC committee called the “diversity committee” for representation of minority community students admitted at Nalsar.

Several Nalsar students said that the concept of such a committee was borrowed from Oxford University and Nalsar was the first Indian law school to implement it.

Until last year, each LLB class at Nalsar voted for its representatives on the eight SBC sub-committees and then these 40 class representatives voted in the members of the SBC executive, as well as the eight convenors (the sub-committees are academic, cultural, hostel welfare, student welfare, sports , moot court society, literary and debating society and mess committees).

However, the proposal for direct elections faced strong opposition from a majority of students, who debated it before a committee reviewing Nalsar’s election rules, confirmed Nalsar vice chancellor Prof Faizan Mustafa.

Nalsar reviews its constitution

This year’s SBC elections at Nalsar were preceded by the formation of a Constitutional Review Committee (CRC) consisting of final year students Aymen Mohammad, Anindita Mukherjee and Rupali Samuel, two fourth year students, one second year student and three graduates of the class of 2014.

The CRC recommended a list of new substantive provisions to insert into the SBC's constitution. The provisions were aimed at increasing diversity of representation on the SBC. It is understood that the recommendations provided, among other things: for direct elections for all posts; to create a student advocate post, equivalent to a Lokpal; for democatric participation of the general student body in constitutional amendments and policy making; and for impeachment by vote instead of resolution.

The CRC put together a draft constitution containing these and other recommendations and opened it for debate before the general student body. The debates, which were conducted before the CRC over three days, were presided over by Nalsar professors Sidharth Chauhan and Jagteshwar Singh Sodhi.

Mustafa told Legally India that direct elections were opposed by a majority of the debaters, because they were of the view that direct elections would politicise Nalsar’s campus like that of traditional universities where student union elections are fought on party lines.

When the Constitutional Review Committee authorised Mustafa to harmonise CRC-recommendations with the objections of the debaters, he accepted the proposal for direct elections only for the presidential post.

On the proposal for a Lokpal, debaters from the general body were of the view that it would diminish the authority of the president, whereas the CRC said that there should be more checks even on the president.

This is not the first time that Nalsar SBC election and constitution has been reviewed, including under the leadership of former vice chancellor Prof Ranbir Singh.

However, the necessity for another review arose this year because the Lyngdoh Committee report had made it legally binding on Indian universities to reform their student elections to allow for diverse representation on student committees. The April 2014 judgment of the Supreme Court in NALSA V Union of India, on transgender rights, added to this context.

“The question of representation of all genders was dealt with [in the review] and it had very little to do with the fact that there were no women in the executive before. The only reason why [the issue of diverse representation] was so successfully raised, is the change in the administration. We have a new vice chancellor so that played a very important role,” commented a source close to the process.

Mustafa said: “I told [students] that the kind of debate they had on the diversity questions, for instance, I felt my teaching on constitutional law has gone waste. I felt they don’t understand the whole question on diversity.

“How they constructed, for instance, the argument against the gender neutral reservation which the CRC has proposed. The CRC has proposed that if one gender dominates executive positions beyond a certain percentage then [the person with the most votes in the other gender] should take over.

“I think [it is not fair] to replace [a winning candidate] with a defeated person], but that is my personal view. I am not saying I am going to overrule them. I just think they could have argued in a different way.”

Three constitutions to rule them all

The CRC has now been disbanded and three kinds of SBC Constitutions exist at Nalsar.

One is the already-existing constitution, the substantive provisions of which govern the budgetary allocations between the eight SBC committees and the functioning of the SBC, including each council member’s role.

Then there is the transitional constitution which consists of those recommendations of the CRC which were accepted by the administration – i.e. direct presidential elections, formation of the diversity committee, and inclusion of LLM representatives on the SBC.

The third constitution is the draft constitution prepared by the CRC, containing all the recommendations which may or may not be implemented by the administration in the near future.

Paradigm shift?

“Our first election, we heard that the men were being made to conduct internal elections in the 'boys' hostel' so we tried to do the same in our own hostel,” wrote CRC member Mukherjee on her personal blog. She claimed that female hostellers finally chose not to take that “politically expedient” route, in favour of the “principled stance” of allowing fair democracy.

“The next morning, we went in for the elections; the men came in with their candidates fixed (and their proxy candidates fixed too), and we spoke of fair democracy. Needless to say, all the eight representatives we had that year were men,” she added in her blog.

“The model was replicated year after year […] there was deal making (and breaking) amongst men […], it was easy to rig, and figuring out the way 40 voters would vote (and threatening them with violence if they did not vote according to what was asked of them) was a whole lot easier than actually running a campaign on a manifesto.”

Dr Anup Surendranath - the fourth Nalsar SBC president under the written constitution who now teaches at NLU Delhi – commented: “I can think of quite a few women who became convenors. Convenors were also a part of core decision making within the committees. There was a lot of discussion even during our time as to how boys were setting the political agenda. The general discourse and the course of the election [was such that] the mood was set by the boys and that sort of space was not given to the girls.”

The new president, Vardhani, had a different view. She said: “There has never been too much boy domination in Nalsar. There were girls in the executive but most girls weren’t too interested [in SBC work]. Maybe it was because we couldn’t get too much work done.”

Vardhani was the convenor of the mess committee last year. Speaking to Legally India she dubbed it “the committee that is hated the most”, explaining that in the Rs 80/month paid per student as mess charges, it is difficult to get clean and healthy food provisioned in the mess. “People thought I did a fantastic job with that,” she commented.

“[The win] was definitely due to the general popularity of Sneha. She has done a lot of work in the previous year, a great amount of work. She is a very hard working candidate,” commented final-year student Divyang Trivedi, adding that her opponent for the presidential post, Harsh Khemka – last year's vice president – was also very hardworking candidate and had done justice to the post he had held.

But “being the first strong woman candidate she crossed the finishing line ahead of Harsh,” said Trivedi.