A section of West Bengal’s intelligentsia has demanded the removal of Visva Bharati vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty for insulting Nobel laureate Amartya Sen during the recent row over the university’s claim on part of the land covered by Sen’s ancestral home on the campus at Santiniketan in Birbhum district.
Economist Abhirup Sarkar, painter Shuvaprasanna, thespian Manoj Mitra, singer Pratul Mukherjee and poet Joy Goswami are among those who have spoken up against Chakrabarty. They signed a public petition on Sunday.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi is chancellor of Visva Bharati, which is the state’s only central university. It was established by Rabindranath Tagore at Bolpur in Birbhum district in 1921.
“What’s happening at Visva Bharati is part of a consorted effort to malign Bengal by tarnishing the image of a prominent personality such as Amartya Sen. All Bengalis must rise and oppose this insult to our state,” said Mukherjee.
“If required, we will all go to Visva Bharati and start an agitation,” Shuvaprasanna said.
Mitra referred to recent incidents in which teachers and students of Visva Bharati had to move court to challenge disciplinary action taken against them. The verdicts in almost all the cases went against the university.
Visva Bharati has been in news since 2018, when Chakrabarty took over as vice-chancellor. The campus has seen a number of agitations following suspension of teachers and students. Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) state leaders have always spoken in Chakrabarty’s support.
The Calcutta high court recently said in an order that “stigmatic aspersions” led to the summary termination of service of Sudipta Bhattacharya, an economics professor, in December last year. He was also president of the teachers’ association.
Protesting the termination, 261 academics from across India and prominent US-based philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky spoke out in support of Bhattacharya and sought the intervention of President Droupadi Murmu.
On Monday, a division bench of the Calcutta high court upheld a December order of a single bench that imposed a fine of ₹1 lakh on Visva Bharati for initiating disciplinary action against another professor, Debotosh Sinha, who recommended child care leave for a teacher in 2021.
The vice-chancellor triggered another row in 2022 by claiming that Amartya Sen’s father, Ashutosh Sen, who was a professor at Visva Bharati, purchased only 1.25 decimals of land and the remaining 0.13 decimal covered by the property should be returned to the university. Three letters were sent to Amartya Sen.
On January 30, chief minister Mamata Banerjee met 89-year-old Sen and handed a state land and revenue department record showing that all 1.38 decimal covered by the property belonged to him through a mutation executed in 2006.
Sen, who has always been vocal against the central government, told media that he has been targeted because certain people in Delhi dislike him.
No Visva Bharati official reacted to the demand raised by the intellectuals.