By backtracking on its decision not to conduct a repoll for the student union elections, the authorities may have bought peace for the time being, but the student union leaders themselves have cocked a snook at the authorities by securing four stay orders on the elections. And this may just be the beginning.

Instead of guiding the university firmly through a difficult phase, the authorities have vacillated right since the cancellation of the December 24 polls. That day, observers fumed, ``The university union has forfeited its democratic right.'' They said no elections would be held in the near future.

Four days later, the same observers -- all members of the Syndicate -- filed out of the Syndicate room, murmuring that the students' democratic right could not be taken away.

Student union president and vice-dean of the faculty of Science S R Pandya grandly announced, ``The university authorities have learnt a lesson from this election''.

But that doesn't appear to be so. Himself party to the repoll decision, Pandya told Express Newsline that the university authorities should not succumb to pressure, and could yet go back to their decision against conducting the elections again.

Pandya was just one of the many to turn tail on their earlier stand. Observers and other professors on duty during the December 24 elections, too, had said that if the university had to keep political interference at bay, it should not it hold the elections again.

As if this weren't enough, the authorities are still to look into the instances of bogus voting and looting of ballot-boxes on December 24. Even the inquiry into the ballot paper omission -- the trigger of the trouble -- was taken up, for all intents and purposes, four days after the incident, after the students ransacked the union office again, demanding counting of votes of elections where polling had been peaceful.

They'd probably tasted blood when the authorities succumbed to ear-deafening slogan-shouting to call a repoll for all posts on January 5.

Dismissing charges that the university was falling victim to pressure tactics, Vice-Chancellor Anil Kane said, ``The students responsible for booth capturing and rigging are no longer seen on the campus''.

To ensure the incidents of December 24 do not recur, patron of the student union Pro-Vice-Chancellor Deepak Kumar De said that adequate security arrangements had been made. A solution indeed, but cosmetic.