On 7th July, the Ashoka University Student Government (AUSG) conducted the confirmation hearing of its Ministers amid much speculation. The hearing witnessed several rounds of back-and-forth, with a couple of nominees just about scraping through. Of the seven Ministers nominated, six were confirmed, while Romil Jain, nominee to the position of Enivronment Minister did not meet the requisite two-thirds majority. The post of Environment Minister remains vacant at the time of writing this article.
Who are the Ministers and how are they appointed?
The Governing Code, available in the AUSG’s Public Information Drive, provides for seven Ministerial positions - the Ministers of Academic Affairs, Campus Life, Sports, Culture (Jazbaa), Environment (Tarang), Community Well Being and Technology. These positions are based on applications that are vetted by the President, Vice President and Speaker of the House. Following an interview by this three-member panel and the outgoing Minister, one applicant is nominated to each position. They are then required to be confirmed by the House of Representatives (HoR), in a two-thirds majority vote. The HoR is composed of 13 members, and 9 votes are required to approve a ministerial appointment.
Apart from the ministerial nominations, the hearing also saw the appointment of Dhruv Gandhi (UG’25) to the position of Treasurer and Avisikta Sinha (UG’25) to the position of Public Relations Director. According to the Governing Code, applications for these positions are opened to the public; and later appointed through the mutual consensus of the President and the Speaker.
Aditi Warrier (ASP’25), President of the AUSG, told The Edict that they chose to go “over and above” the constitutionally mandated process for ministerial appointments. Last year, the AUSG had circulated a form for applicants and members of the panel to declare their “conflicts of interest.” This time around, due to a “shortage of time”, the President, Vice President and Speaker “self-declared” their conflicts of interest with specific applicants. In case of such conflicts for two or more of the three member panel, the interview was opened to members of the House to then form a two member panel. Once candidates were scored and chosen, Members of the House were sent details of the chosen applicants, along with the rationale behind the selection. This, coupled with presentations made by the appointees themselves on the day of the hearing, were used to help make an informed choice on each candidate.
The Hearing
The hearing began with the confirmations of the Sports Minister Aryamaan Girish (UG’25), Campus Life Minister Urja Hansraj (ASP’25) and Jazbaa (Cultural) Minister Saransh Goel (UG’25) with consensus across the board. Later, Community Well Being Minister Padmasritha Morusupalli’s (UG’25) appointment was confirmed similarly, with little controversy.
The nominations of Ibrahim Khalil (UG’25) to the Technology Ministry, Romil Jain (UG’25) to the Environment Ministry and Sania Bhargava (UG’25) to the Ministry of Academic Affairs proved more contentious. Following her presentation, Sania was met with a round of questions on her previous term in the Ministry, when she was a member of the Office of Academic Affairs (OAA) and Policy Team. A colleague who served on the same team, Nikita Bose (UG’25) implied her absence at meetings and relative inaction as a member. When asked about her role in one of the team’s projects that year, Sania said that while she was “the one who suggested” the idea, she was not able to “exactly work” on it or attend any of the team meetings.
Cutting off more follow-up questions, the Speaker hastened the House into voting. With several members not voting at all, the nomination struggled to reach the requisite two-thirds majority of nine votes. In a departure from normal procedure, the Speaker decided to “circle back” to this appointment later. Sania’s confirmation passed well into the next presentation, with 10 members voting “Yes”.
Romil Jain, who was to be appointed to Tarang – the Environment Ministry, failed to muster the requisite majority. With 4 members of the Toofan Collective all voting “No”, his confirmation fell short of the 9 vote mark by 2 votes. “It is a loss that he will not be serving as our Environment Minister this year,” Aditi says, “He is nothing less than deserving of the position.” At present, there is no clarity on how and when the process for appointing a new Environment Minister will take place.
Ibrahim’s appointment to the Technology Ministry was questioned on two fronts, largely by members of the Toofan Collective. The first related to his role in the Election Commission prior to his application for a ministerial position, and the second was to do with the way his interview was conducted. Both of these are elaborated in the following section of the piece. During the hearing however, his confirmation passed with a 10 vote majority.
Toofan’s Contentions
In an interview with The Edict, Ibrahim spoke about his conversations with Domil Antony Johnson (UG’25), Founder of the Toofan collective, both just before and after the ministerial hearing. He admitted that these interactions confused the boundaries of the personal and political. One particular incident preceding the hearing, Domil approached Ibrahim warning him that he wouldn’t be reaching the “mark” (getting the votes required to be confirmed as minister). Ibrahim said that multiple such conversations, smirks and a “patronizing tone” left him feeling like Domil was “pushing it to the brink.”
The Edict also spoke with Domil, who emphasized that Toofan did not “purposefully target” anybody. Toofan’s actions at the hearing, he reinforced, were attempts at getting some “accountability [...] only possible in a public meeting.” Domil brought up several “inaccuracies” in the procedure of appointing ministers.
First, and what he found most “upsetting”, was the appointment of “members of the Ashoka University Election Commission as ministers.” Referring to Ibrahim, Domil said that he resigned from the post of Chief Technology Officer (CTO), “already knowing that [he] would become the next Tech Minister.” The reason for his larger questioning of Ibrahim as a candidate, Domil said, was because the selection process had been carried out without “any Opposition member’s insight.” He proceeded to justify this further by bringing up Ibrahim’s email from one year ago, canvassing for four Leher candidates who had stood for seats in the 2023 UG Council Elections. Domil claims that this public email was sent in the ‘silent hours’ before the election, and that this “automatically” indicates an indirect connection that has been “growing” over one year. His sources for this information happen to be a variety of people engaging in hearsay about Ibrahim’s working relationships.
Ibrahim’s response to these allegations, both in the hearing and in his interview with The Edict remain uniform. He emphasizes that the CTO is constitutionally not a part of the Election Commission, likening them to “PR department [members] and volunteers.” Indeed, Part VIII of the Constitution specifies that the Election Commission consists of the Chief Election Officer and one Election Commissioner from each student cohort. It does not specifically mention the role or relation of a CTO. Ibrahim adds also “at no point of time” was his “name signed up for both parties” and that Teshi Sharma, the Chief Election Commissioner had cleared him of “all conflict of interest charges.” Domil thinks it does not matter that this is not mentioned in the Constitution, and “fundamentally, by ethics, it is not good for an Ashoka University Election Commision (AUEC) member to become a minister [...] Tomorrow, will Edict members become part of the Cabinet?”
Second, and most “worrisome” for Domil was Ibrahim’s interview process. “Rahul, the PhD council member from Toofan was supposed to sit for that interview. Right after he signed up for that slot, the candidate shift[ed] the slot”, Domil says about the scheduling. He also adds that information about this shift had not been communicated to Rahul. Asked about this, Ibrahim said that he had merely shifted his slot to a freer time on the schedule. Domil brought up how Ibrahim was interviewed by only one person, Ahana, the Speaker of the house, and a Leher member.
Based on this, he further refutes the transparency of Ibrahim’s interview process – “two elected SG members were present” for everyone else’s appointment process but only one in Ibrahim’s case. “The mandatory rule that they established themselves has not been followed in this case.” “How is it fair for other aspirants?”, he questions.
Aditi, however, maintains that “nobody volunteered” from the House despite being “repeatedly requested” for Ibrahim’s interview until the very last minute. They would have indeed “liked to have” members of the House do it since both she and Samarth had conflicts of interest with Ibrahim. Given the lack of response, however, they were “forced to compromise” and have the Speaker, Ahana, and outgoing Technology Minister Maanas Kejriwal conduct the interview. Further, Aditi says Ibrahim simply “switched his slot” on the public sign-up sheet, and the interview was conducted at a different time than was initially specified to the House. “We may not have been able to acheive the standards of unbiasedness we set out to,” she says, “but it was not for lack of trying”.
Third, Domil alleges “fallacies” in Romil’s appointment process as well. “We promoted Ahana as the Speaker of the House to remain a fair actor between us”, Domil says, referring to how members of Toofan voted in favour of Ahana’s appointment as Speaker, enabling her nomination to pass. When The Edict spoke to Ahana Walanju, Speaker of the House, she seemed to reinforce this thought, “There have been times when it seemed as though Domil had done me a favour by making me the Speaker [...] notion that a ‘favor given must be returned’ was imposed too strongly.” Domil denied these allegations, saying only that the speaker must act independently, for “all collectives inside the SG.”
Domil also adds that the SG had promised anonymous marking and vetting through the Election Commission. He claims that Toofan spoke to one Election Commissioner, who confirmed that all the President, Vice President and Speaker did was share the responses to the form. They did not take any measures to ensure anonymity, and there were identifying “markers.”
Lastly, Domil says Toofan members “repeatedly requested them (the President, Vice President, Speaker) that the ministerial applications did not go to many of the Masters and PhD cohorts.” This was a concern that they failed to address, he adds, questioning whether this is a AUSG “that only caters to undergraduates?”
Following the Ministerial confirmation hearing, The Edict learnt that the Toofan collective has filed a petition regarding Ibrahim’s appointment. The petition asks for the votes of three HoR members from Toofan, Meenakshi Rana (PhD’21), Anulya Parameshwaran (MA’2023) and Gayathri Nair (MSc’2023) to be changed from ‘Yes’ to ‘No.’ The grounds for the petition reflect the same woes expressed by Domil in the hearing and in his interview with The Edict. Gayathri and Anulya, in interviews with The Edict, both maintain that they have “nothing personal” against any of the candidates. It is the “discrepancies” pointed out to her “by her friends and her party,” Gayathri says, that prompted her to want to change her vote. “I will be aligned with my party right?” she says, when asked to elaborate on her rationale .
The Speaker of the House’s response to the petition, The Edict has learnt, addresses each of the grounds for it to be filed. It says that the vote was “subject to a public hearing and had already passed”, thus the ballot was to remain unchanged. The petition concludes by setting two options as the “only way forward”: for the President to call for the Minister’s impeachment or for the petition-filers to collect a minimum of 100 signatures from the electorate.
Where does the SG go from here?
The failure of the Environment Ministry vote, the controversy following the Technology Minister’s appointment and general acrimony in discourse all point to growing fissures in Ashokan polity. When asked whether this partisan divide would continue to impede the functioning of the AUSG in the future, Aditi remains optimistic. “I hope that when we all meet in person and begin to interact outside the sphere of strictly formal meetings, we will become friendly with one another and learn to cooperate.” “The spirit of the Student Government,” she says, “is not some kind of internal power struggle.” Alluding to her experience in the previous Student Government, when it saw “no kind of partisan voting”, Aditi says she is “hoping very much that this isn’t how it continues to be.”
The writers are the Editor and Junior Editor of the Politics Newsdesk department at The Edict (AY 24-25).
Credits: This article was written with inputs from Jyotsna Sidharth.
(Edited by Fatema Tambawalla)
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