Visva-Bharati Vice-Chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty has written a strongly worded letter to West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee, telling her that people in her party were caught in corruption cases whereas he had been trying to eliminate corruption from the Rabindranath Tagore-founded institution during his tenure.
“In pursuant of my two letters addressed to you on 25 and 30 September, I am making the same request to you again within a gap of one month. I was under the impression that a month was enough to enable you to make up your mind. I was also confident that the road was to be returned to Visva-Bharati given your steadfast commitment to carry forward the Rabindrik traditions. Unfortunately, you appear to be indifferent to our request for returning the road to Visva-Bharati presumably because you do not appear to see the ground reality by your eyes,” Prof. Chakrabarty wrote last weekend.
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“You are perturbed that in the plaque [demarcating the heritage part of Santiniketan], Rabindranath does not figure… The UNESCO declared Santiniketan as a World Heritage Site and we need to follow the ASI instructions while preparing the plaque and we are doing it, the result of which will soon be visible,” he said.
“You perhaps know that your sycophants preferred to keep you in the dark that the road which you took away from us just before the 2021 State Assembly Elections was congested because of the haphazard parking of Totos [electric rickshaws] and also the presence of local vendors selling souvenirs. We endeavoured hard to keep the road free from congestion for two reasons: (a) the ICOMOS [International Council for Monuments and Sites, the premier organisation which recommended Santiniketan to be eligible for consideration for the World Heritage tag] in its report put this condition that Visva-Bharati needs to take control of this road passing through the ashram; and (b) the congestion was so bad that those who came to Santiniketan as tourists and visitors confronted serious problems even to move around the place on foot,” he wrote.
“You are 100% correct when you claim that there were many who contributed to this recognition of Santiniketan as a World Heritage Site. Your statement that we owe this to Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore carries our sentiments; we always admitted this which is evident in my many public statements on print and visual media… What we did not expect from a very emotional and caring Chief Minister like you was your complete dismissal of the role of the present administration,” the V-C said in his letter.
“Yes, it is true that the megalomanic Rajya Saba member of your political party [possibly a veiled reference Jawahar Sircar] tried to gain this recognition and the then Prime Minister also tried without, of course, success. Now, if you attribute the success to their failed attempts, do you think that you are fair to those who worked hard since 2019 to get this global recognition?” Prof. Chakrabarty said, perhaps suggesting that one could not credit India’s freedom to A.O. Hume, the British civil servant, just because he happened to be the founder of the party.
The tenure of Prof. Chakrabarty, unless he secures an extension, ends in early November. According to the administration, dozens of posters have come up in the campus demanding his continuation as the Vice-Chancellor.
