Amid a pattern of uncontested GSAA UG elections, Siddhant faces familiar challenges

The GSAA UG position has gone uncontested for several years running. Every election season, there is a debate as to whether uncontested elections affect the quality of manifestos, mainly in terms of ambition. Notably, this has been a fluctuating metric; some manifestos have indeed tried to tackle challenges that require a huge administrative overhead, and possess the potential to impact large parts of the student community, while other candidates have relied more on easily executable points, albeit with limited impact.

Siddhant Gupta, the lone contesting candidate for the position of GSAA UG for 2026-27, brings a mix of experiences. He served as the convenor of Consult Club in 2024-25 and subsequently as a Manager in the Sustainability Cell, which, interestingly, falls under Hostel Affairs. His campaign has been largely defined by the ability to gather unanimous support from the outgoing council; however, his manifesto points seem hesitant to push novel policy reforms and are focused instead on expanding the resource base for students.

With the exception of expanding the Reasonable Adjustments Clause for Persons with Benchmark Disabilities, Siddhant’s key initiatives are composed of points from previous manifestos that have either historically not reached many students or simply involve the restructuring of existing resources. Moreover, there do not seem to be any strategically unique plans at the moment to overcome the obstacles that have stalled these reforms before, as was highlighted in his soapbox presentation.

For example, his push to develop guidebooks and magazines raised a key contention during his soapbox presentation, standing in stark contrast to UGAC’s recent efforts to make its resources more accessible through web-based initiatives via portals like ReaCH and UG Wiki. The defence relied on a concerning and unfounded aversion to quantifying impact through metrics such as readership and reach, similar to the previous GS tenure. 

The identification of resource gaps, though superficially reasonable, on closer examination resembles a solution in search of a problem. The pursuit of genuinely novel challenges has been supplanted by incremental extensions of existing initiatives, and Siddhant’s defence of the GSAA UG’s role in this regard, has been unconvincing. There is much to be desired from his vision for pushing policy reforms and for developing concrete execution strategies for policy changes that have failed to pass before. Emphasising these can set an otherwise lacking ambitious tone for his tenure; this requires looking beyond the usual approach towards events and resources, which have typically suffered from limited reach and impact.