Patna, Aug. 21: The Bihar universities’ decision to hold student union elections after nearly three decades has generated the hope of fresh air wafting through the state’s political set-up dominated primarily by youth leaders of yesteryear.

Patna University vice-chancellor Shambhu Nath Si-ngh was the first to announce students’ union poll in his Independence Day address in the wake of a directive of the state education department. Universities like Magadh University, too, followed suit.

The Nitish Kumar government has decided to hold the student union elections in the light of the Lyngdoh committee report. The panel, set up on the basis of a Supreme Court directive, had in its 2006 report recommended election to students’ unions in institutes across the country.

It was in 1984 when the PU and other universities in the state, except Bhagalpur University, had last got student unions through due election process. Be it in the ruling establishment or the Opposition, most of the state’s top leaders had made their foray into mainstream politics from college campuses.

Chief minister Nitish Kumar, RJD chief Lalu Prasad, deputy chief mi-nister Sushil Kumar Modi, he-alth minister Ashwini Cho-ubey, agriculture minister Na-rendra Singh and BJP national spokesman, Ravishankar Prasad — all have their origin in PU students’ union.

These leaders had used the 1974 Jaiprakash Narayan-led Bihar movement to jump into active politics.

But the fact remains that JP had first gone to the campuses to organise the students — who went on to become the pillar of his movement — against the imposition of Emergency by the Indira Gandhi-led government in the Centre in 1974.

“It (students’ election) is a positive development because the campuses must have unions of students elected in the democratic set-up. But the agencies to hold the polls must be autonomous, ensuring free and fair elections,” Leader of the Opposition in the Assembly Abdul Bari Siddiqui, himself a product of the JP movement, told The Telegraph.

Senior Congress leader and AICC member Samir Singh, who had contested the last election for the position of PU students’ union president in 1984, said: “It is good that the universities are going to hold polls. We hope that the campuses will once again throw fresh blood full with new energy and ideas in the state’s political set-up.”

Nitish Kumar had recently said: “The political cadres are very limited. You have to pick and choose only from an existing set of politicos who are not that large in number.”

Thus, the coming student bodies’ elections have given a hope for the expansion of the political class and also emergence of fresh leadership in the state.