Manifesto Rejected, SRC Candidates Forced to Compromise
By Kow Kwan Yee, Tan Teck Joo
Kampar, June 19 (J-on) – UTAR Student Representative Committee (SRC) election encountered early tension before campaign when Department of Student Affairs (DSA) rejected some of the candidates’ manifestos yesterday.
DSA Head of Department, Mavis Tsang Mei Lin said the team Empower which consists of five candidates had written two sentences which are against the constitution of election.
“The candidates have to delete those sentences or else their manifesto will be rejected,” she said.
Empower team’s candidates were arguing with Tsang in DSA office
“The first unacceptable sentence is emphasising unsolved problems during past SRC term,” she said.
Empower’s manifesto stated: Painfully slow WBLE access, unable to login for exam results, parking issues, and the list goes on. Three years in, and two SRCs later, the problems remain.
The second rejected sentence is about previous SRC chairman’s statement in J-on interview, admitting SRC is a puppet organisation.
The sentence in manifesto: While some SRC representatives did try to be the students’s voice, but past leaders have also admitted that there is little that they can do because of SRC’s limited powers. They accepted SRC as it was, a handicap representation body.
She said the candidates should not accuse previous SRC leaders and include their team blogspot address in the manifesto.
“According to election constitution, candidates should not have media coverage during campaign, include using blogspot as platform,” she said.
Meanwhile, Empower team Chairman Candidate Oh Chin Eng said DSA had no right to reject their manifesto as they are abiding by the constitution.
“We regret this incident, this is a kind of harassment. Constitution is the highest law in the campus, but the officers do their personally interpretation on the constitution,” he told J-on when contacted.
He said the constitution only stated “No media coverage” and did not define the word “media”.
“As we know, blogspot is not one of media. Media are like The Star, Malaysiakini, but we did not ask for such coverage,” he said.
However, after two hours of arguing, Empower team was forced to compromise with DSA’s suggestion, which is to delete the sentences.
At the end, Empower team was forced to compromise and deleted the sentences
When asked the reason of compromising, Oh said that it is to get DSA’s approval so that they can spread Empower’s ideology to all students, and to urge students to voice.
“We had prepared for any worst circumstances, including the risk to be disqualified. However, we insisted that we are following constitution,” he added.
