Shailaja Neelakantan writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education that student elections in India are a farm league for national campaign thuggery:

[S]tudent elections are seen as steppingstones to national politics, and therefore a route to wealth and power. Scores of important political figures, including Atal Behari Vajpayee, the former prime minister, got their start in university campaigns…

Mr. Rai’s death marked the climax of three and a half months of fear unleashed on Lucknow by members of various student groups, who defaced public property, extorted money from businessmen and doctors at gunpoint, and forced the university to shut down classes with threats of violence…

Many of these thugs become perennial students on the 10+ year plan:

Some Lucknow candidates have been at the university for as long as 13 years, earning not only bachelor’s but also numerous master’s degrees in order to continue their involvement in university politics while they wait to advance to the national level of their parties.

They’re generously funded by the national parties:

During the September elections, Mr. Khanna says, he saw student groups giving away mobile-phone cards, chocolates, and coupons for liquor, among other freebies. At Lucknow University, student leaders spent an estimated $444,000 on the elections this year. [Ed.: Yes, that’s in dollars.] “We don’t get money. We get support and nonmonetary resources to mobilize students…” He was evasive as to what he meant by nonmonetary resources.

In contrast, filmmaker Mani Ratnam lauded student activism in Yuva; his students were reformists leveraging a student campaign into a Lok Sabha seat.

Who’s got the world’s longest constitution? Suketu Mehta claims in Maximum City that India’s #1. At approximately 500K words via a sophisticated algorithm known as Back-of-a-Napkin, that sounds about right: Indians took British bureaucracy, mixed in their dilatory sense of time, quasi-socialist ethos and love of jawboning, and inflated government like a puffed puri.

But Alabama is contesting the claim, with more than 740 amendments and 310K words. India’s constitution has fewer than 100 amendments. Anyone know for sure?

By the way, Alabamans may be the most amendment-happy people in the world, but they couldn’t find it in their strict constructionist souls to strike school segregation and poll taxes from their constitution earlier this month. For shame.