AUEC declares Monsoon 2026 election results

On the evening of Thursday, the 24th of September, the Ashoka University Election Commission (AUEC) released the results of the Ashoka University Student Government (AUSG) Monsoon 2026 Elections. 

Kriti Chhibber (UG '28) from Horizon has been elected President. Chaitanya Gupta (UG ’29), an independent candidate, has been elected as the General Secretary. Chhibber got a vote share of 43.8% and Gupta, a vote share of 39.1% (note that AUSG Elections follow the first-past-the-post system).

Chhibber also won the Third Year Council seat but chose to resign in order to retain the Office of the President, since candidates cannot hold two seats simultaneously. Owing to this, one seat in the Third Year Council is expected to remain vacant till the Spring electoral cycle.

The elected candidates for the First Year Council are: Shreevats Shukla with 15% voteshare, Nilesh Mandhyan with 12.3% vote share, Harsh Ravi Nagdev with 8.9% vote share, and Lakshmi Sarayu Adepu with 8% of vote share.

The elected candidates for the Fourth Year Council are: Roshni Sudhir Patra (UG ’27) with 29.6%, Aryan Chaudhary (UG ’27) with 24.2%, Sulagna Moitra (UG ’27) with 14.2%, and Vaanadhi Dhandapani (UG ’27) with 12.8% of the votes.

Shambhavi Gupta (YIF '27) was elected the YIF batch representative is with 61% of the vote share, and Aan Rajyavardhan Rakshit (UG ’25) was elected the Late Graduate representative with 82.1% of the vote-share.

The Edict interviewed Navneet Kaur (UG ‘28), the Chief Election Officer and Election Commissioner Utsav Mathur (UG ’27). The AUEC wanted a targeted outreach programme for this election cycle, especially for first year students. This cycle has broken the spell of unsatisfied quorums. Mathur said, “We did another town hall majorly targeting the first years, and we received a good enough turnout in all the town halls that we conducted.” 

“[The AUEC realized that] the moment we send out emails, there is a 10-20 increase in the votes cast. We sent out hourly/bi-hourly emails across all batches,” Mathur said. He added that since many first years contested the elections, the voter turnout from their batch was also much higher.

When asked about student cynicism and apathy toward the AUSG, Mathur said, “The fact that we had to conduct a third election does reflect a bit on student apathy, but also, the feeling that we all garnered is that ‘this time, we have to do it’. There was a ‘reverse-effect’ also; we were assuming that after the quorum is met, no other votes will be cast, but we saw all other council elections and the presidential and general secretary elections exceeding the quorum by a huge margin.”

(Edited by Gauri Deshpande and Anamta Husain)