The Trinamul Congress on Friday began a demonstration in Santiniketan after the Visva-Bharati administration had failed to meet chief minister Mamata Banerjee’s deadline to replace the controversial plaques with new ones with the name of Rabindranath Tagore inscribed on them.

The deadline ended at 10am on Friday.

The demonstration, which continued for over four hours on Friday, will resume on Saturday and will be held for at least eight hours.

A source said the chief minister had instructed the party workers to continue the protest till Visva-Bharati removed the controversial plaques.

“We have set up a stage and began our demonstration today on the instruction of our party supremo Mamata Banerjee. We will continue the demonstration till Didi or the top leadership asks us to stop,” said Minakshi Bhattacharya, a Trinamul student leader on the campus.

On September 17, Santiniketan in Birbhum district was added to Unesco’s World Heritage List.

At least two plaques that were recently installed on the varsity campus to notify the Unesco-recognised heritage sites only have the names of its chancellor Narendra Modi and the vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty.

However, the omission of Tagore’s name on them has triggered condemnation from many quarters.

A source said that governor C.V Ananda Bose, who is the rector of the varsity, called the VC on Thursday and asked for an explanation on
why the name of the Nobel laureate was omitted from the plaques.

An official in Raj Bhavan said the VC, in his reply, clarified to Bose that the plaques were temporary and would be replaced by the newer ones with text approved by the Archaeological Survey of India. The VC claimed that he sent the new text for the plaques to the cultural ministry for approval, too.

“Gurudev (Tagore) is a symbol of the greatness and gravitas of Bengal, Bharat, and humanity at large,” a Raj Bhavan official quoted Bose who advised the VC to honour the Nobel laureate in the new plaques that the varsity wants to replace with.

“The plaques with the names of Modi and the VC are permanent construction. The VC had a plan to keep those on campus if the move was not criticised,” said minister Chandranath Sinha, who was present at Friday’s demonstration.