Governor C.V. Ananda Bose called Jadavpur University’s officiating vice-chancellor to a meeting on Thursday morning to review the situation on the campus and advised him to constitute a committee with external members to probe the death of a first-year student who had allegedly been ragged, said a JU official.
The governor, as chancellor of JU, handpicked Buddhadeb Sau last Saturday to officiate as VC.
Hours after the 17-year-old boy died on August 10, the university constituted a seven-member committee of teachers to conduct a probe following instructions from pro-VC Amitabha Datta.
There are no “external experts” on that panel and the university did not have an officiating VC then.
After the meeting with the chancellor at Raj Bhavan, Sau said: “The chancellor has said that, if necessary, I can constitute a separate committee. The chancellor said if I required some permission for this, he would act accordingly. I will first find out why the university’s anti-ragging committee remained inactive so far. I am trying to activate the squad.”
The VC said: “The governor has advised if I think the probe is not being carried out properly, in that case, an ex-judge can be engaged to head a committee. Let me see.”
The officiating VC told The Telegraph that he has instructed all concerned to activate the CCTV cameras inside his chamber. The cameras had been deactivated in July 2015, during the tenure of Suranjan Das as VC.
Sau said: “I need to have footage of students who misbehaved with me in the VC’s chamber on Tuesday in the name of submitting a memorandum. I need to have electronic evidence of such arrogance.”
He also said preparations for installing CCTV cameras at the gates of the main hostel and the campus would start on Friday.
Asked about the need for a probe by external experts at a time when an internal committee of JU is recording statements to investigate the death, Sau said: “It is clear that whatever mechanism we had in place was not sufficient. In that context, he (the chancellor) has advised that if I feel there is a need to extend the committee or do something more, then I should go ahead with it.”
Sau also expressed doubts about the probe by the internal panel. “I don’t know why the internal committee was constituted. This much I know that the anti-ragging squad was asked not to work.... There are complaints that the committee does not have any terms of reference,” he said.
Partha Pratim Roy, general secretary of the JU Teachers’ Association, said: “When the chancellor visited the campus on the evening of August 10, he left it to the university to carry out the probe. Now he is advising the constitution of another committee. This will only delay the probe.”