The ABVP will launch a membership drive on July 9 to expand its footprint across colleges and universities in Bengal.
ABVP’s, often linked to the RSS, immediate goal is to increase the number of members tenfold and dislodge the Trinamool Congress Chhatra Parishad, which held sway almost everywhere except Jadavpur and Presidency universities.
The Left and the radical Left now dominate student politics at JU and Presidency.
State ABVP secretary Neelkantha Bhattacharjee said that last year, the outfit had 74,000 members in Bengal.
“This time, we want to take the figure to at least 10 lakh. More and more students are willing to join us. We have emerged as the main force across campuses. It’s time we expanded our base,” Bhattacharjee said.
“As the numbers swell, it will help us take control of the students’ union by winning the students’ union elections. Once the new education minister is appointed, we will urge the government to resume campus elections,” he said.
In Bengal, campus elections in government and aided colleges were last held in 2013.
Student elections were held in December 2020, but only in four unitary universities, including Jadavpur and Presidency.
The erstwhile Mamata Banerjee had stalled the elections for years, promising reforms.
In July 2025, Calcutta High Court asked the state government to inform the court how it plans to hold student body elections in colleges and universities after a lawyer moved the court, seeking early elections to the student bodies.
Debanjan Paul, a member of the central media team of the ABVP, said the membership drive will be launched on the foundation day of the Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarthi Parishad (ABVP).
Ahead of the membership drive, the ABVP has launched an outreach programme on June 9.
As part of the outreach, the organisation has set up help desks to engage with students on campuses before they are drafted into its fold.
Paul said potential members will be profiled before they are taken in.
“We want to check the antecedents of our potential members. We want to check whether the student had anything to do with the TMCP or what their role on the campus had been,” said Paul.
The ABVP has already asserted its presence among the teachers and staff at Jadavpur University. The outfit has described JU’s political graffiti as wall vandalism and called for a ban on it.
On June 3, ABVP supporters moved into Surendranath College in Sealdah to protest the ills that led to a cash haul and the discovery of a gun and planted their flags.
The CPM student wing, the SFI, said the ABVP was trying to draft Trinamool members into its fold.
“Unlike us, they (the ABVP) do not have supporters on campus,” said Debanjan Dey, the SFI state secretary.
“The membership drive has been launched to take the Trinamool student supporters into their organisation. They are thinking of grabbing the space that has been left vacant by the TMCP,” he said.