Varsity talk on BJP rout scrapped after protest An invitation letter for the open-to-all online lecture was uploaded on the Visva-Bharati’s website late on Tuesday
Visva-Bharati’s plan to hold an online lecture on May 18 to delve into the reasons for the BJP’s electoral debacle in Bengal had to be cancelled within 12 hours of its announcement on Tuesday following protests from various quarters, including Prime Minister and chancellor Narendra Modi’s nominee in the university’s executive council.
Sources said Visva-Bharati vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty had taken the initiative to hold an online lecture to analyse “Why BJP failed to win West Bengal Assembly Election?”.
SANTINIKETAN: A notice on a lecture uploaded on the Visva-Bharati website on Tuesday went missing on Wednesday afternoon, hours after it was placed in the public domain.
The topic was “Why BJP failed to win West Bengal assembly elections”. VB, a central university, had invited Sanjay Kumar, co-director of Lokniti, a research programme at Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), to deliver the lecture on May 18. Vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty was scheduled to preside over the lecture. Accordingly, the joining link for the Zoom meeting was also in the public domain. This was the first time VB had arranged a lecture on an overtly political topic.
The nominee of Prime Minister and Chancellor Narendra Modi in the executive council, Dulal Chandra Ghosh, on Tuesday led around 100 retired teachers and staff of Visva-Bharati, to protest in front of the varsity’s central office against the varsity administration’s decision to scrap free medical consultation at the university hospital in Santiniketan.
Ghosh, also the president of the Visva-Bharati Pensioners’ Association, has written to the Prime Minister’s Office, requesting him to intervene and make the varsity administration reconsider.
“Pensioners have been getting healthcare services at the hospital since the time of Rabindranath Tagore. Ever since vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty came here, he had been saying we will not be able to consult doctors at the hospital for free as the central government provides us Rs 1,000 a month as medical allowance. The varsity administration stopped the service since July 2020,” said Ghosh.