Besu students return to college, which remained closed for a few days in March following clashes. A Telegraph picture

The CPM has suffered a blow in the first-ever elections at Bengal Engineering and Science University (Besu) to form the court and faculty council. The polls were held on Monday.

Candidates backed by anti-CPM lobbies have won nine of the 14 seats of the court. In the three faculty councils, anti-CPM candidates have won most of the 15 seats.

There are three seats each for the professors and teachers (other than professors) in the court. All six seats in the two constituencies have been bagged by the anti-CPM lobby.

The three seats for students have been won by the Independent Consolidation, which is opposed to the SFI.

But the single seat in the postgraduate students’ constituency has gone to the students’ wing of the CPM.

Pro-CPM employees have also won the two seats each in the officers’ and the supervisory staff constituency and the non-teaching staff constituency.

Registrar Biman Bandyopadhyay, however, refused to admit that those who had contested the elections had any political affiliation.

“True, there were two panels. But both were apolitical and the candidates had contested in their individual capacity,” he said.

CPM sources, however, expressed concern over the poor performance of the candidates backed by them.

“The Citu-affiliated employees’ union of Besu has 350 members, while the one backed by the Intuc has only 37. One of the defeated candidates from the anti-CPM camp got 177 votes. This means that a large number of members from the Citu-affiliated union voted in favour of the Intuc candidate,” said a CPM leader.

The elections for the court and the faculty councils were held in accordance with the Bengal Engineering and Science University Act, 2004, which was formulated following the upgrade of the Shibpur institute to a university from deemed university.

The act had stipulated that the first polls were to be held in 2005. “But the elections were pending for the past three years because of technical reasons,” the registrar said.