With the resignation of vice chancellor Abhijit Chakraborty on January 12, peace and calm has returned to West Bengal™s showpiece university. But with the ruling Trinamool Congress Party determined to infiltrate the state™s premier varsity, its future is bleak Somdev Thakur & Summiya Yasmeen After four months of student and teacher agitations during which classes and academic time tables were routinely disrupted, peace and calm has returned to West Bengal™s showpiece Jadavpur University (JU, estb. 1955). On January 12, the state™s beleaguered chief minister Mamata Banerjee, embroiled in the statewide Saradha chit fund scam and battling the flight of members of her Trinamool Congress (TMC) party to a resurgent BJP, visited the JU campus to announce the œvoluntary resignation of vice chancellor Abhijit Chakrabarty, the students™ hate object. A majority of JU students backed by some academics had been continuously agitating for Chakrabarty™s removal following a brutal police assault on the university™s students on September 17 last year. The students were demanding an independent investigation into the molestation of a woman student on the JU campus on August 28, when Chakrabarty called in the police to break a 12-hour gherao of the academic council by the agitated students. By summoning the police on the JU campus, Chakrabarty breached an iron ” albeit unwritten ” law of Indian academia. And inevitably the state™s lumpenised policemen broke up the agitation with extreme violence and brutality. Nevertheless the mercurial Banerjee, whose TMC ended 34 years of rule in West Bengal of the Communist Party of India-Marxist (CPM) and its allies in a spectacular electoral victory in 2011, adamantly resisted the students™ demands, even confirming Chakrabarty™s appointment as vice chancellor ” he was interim/acting vice chancellor at the time of the police crackdown on students ” on October 6 for a five-year term. But with no let-up in the protests ” in a first for the university, students boycotted the convocation ceremony held on December 24, and 12 students began an indefinite hunger-strike on January 5 ” and the tide of public opinion turning in favour of JU students, Banerjee made a politically expedient volte-face. The ham-fisted reaction of the university authorities and TMC government, to a peaceful and justified student agitation which snowballed into a bitter three-month confrontation between JU students and the state government, has taken a heavy toll on West Bengal™s top-ranked university, which has an enrolment of 8,738 students mentored by 896 faculty. In the process the 60-year-old hitherto non-political unitary varsity has suffered serious loss of reputation and erosion of academic credibility. œThere™s no doubt these recent events have badly dented Jadavpur™s academic reputation. The blame for the prolonged student protests and disruption of academic calendar should be laid at the state government™s door. Not only did the TMC government mishandle the molestation case and resulting protests, it aggravated the situation by refusing to dismiss a vice chancellor so universally disliked by students and faculty. Continuous government interference, first by the CPM during its 34 years in office, and…
