Visva-Bharati vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty took part in an hour-long sit-in on Saturday to demand the control over a 2.9km road that the state government had taken away from the university on January 1, his protest purportedly endorsed by the BJP by way of posters by its youth wing Bharatiya Janata Yuva Morcha pledging to “fight under the VC’s leadership” and urging people to join his “movement”.
An embarrassed university administration had to order the removal of the posters, but not before it sparked off a political row, prompting the BJP to smell a conspiracy.
BJP national secretary Anupam Hazra said the posters were a “conspiracy” to defame his party and the VC.
“During the visit of Amit Shah last month, Trinamul goons tried to malign us by putting up posters across Santiniketan and Bolpur that had Rabindranath Tagore’s picture placed below that of the Union home minister. Today (Saturday) was another conspiracy to defame the BJP and the VC,” Hazra said.
But for many others, the posters validated what Mamata had said at her Bolpur rally on December 29: “I don't have any individual grudge against the VC. Didn’t they find anyone else for the post of the VC? They had to get someone who has a stamp of BJP.”
Trinamul’s Birbhum chief Anubrata Mondal said: “Our supremo Mamata Banerjee has already said that the VC was actually a BJP leader. These posters go on to prove our charge (as correct).”
“The posters prove beyond doubt that the VC is working at the behest of the BJP,” said a senior official of Visva-Bharati on condition of anonymity because of the existing gag order on varsity employees.
The university administration headed by Chakrabarty has been at loggerheads with the state government for the past few days over the ownership of the 2.9km long road connecting Santiniketan to Sriniketan. The road originally belonged to the state’s public works department and the charge of maintaining the stretch was handed over to the university authority in 2017.
Following appeals to the chief minister by residents who raised objections to the varsity imposing an embargo on the movement of vehicles on the road, Mamata issued an instruction to take back the road during an administrative review meeting in Bolpur on December 28.
Around 9am on Saturday, some 300 varsity teaching and non-teaching staff joined Chakraborty at the protest at Chhatimtala.
A petition signed by 380 members of the Visva-Bharati family has also been sent to Mamata requesting her to return the road to the varsity. The letter stated that if the varsity did not get back control of the road, heavy vehicles on the stretch “will shake the foundations” of the architectural and cultural insignias on either side of the road.
Some varsity students also held a demonstration demanding the immediate scrapping of suspension of economics professor and Visva-Bharati Faculty Association president Sudipta Bhattacharyya. He was suspended earlier this week for his complaint against the appointment of a principal of a school under the varsity, but many held the view that he was punished for going against the VC’s attempt to saffronise the campus.
“The VC is demanding rights to the road. But he will have to answer us why so many people are being suspended from the varsity. We are here to demand those answers,” said SFI leader Somnath Sow, who led the protest.
In another show of protest, a group of traders also demonstrated against the VC demanding the return of money that the varsity had collected from them as security deposit for Pous Mela in 2019.
