Education Min sends new text for Santiniketan plaques; VBU forms translation panel
It seems like the controversy around the plaques placed at Visva-Bharati University (VBU) to celebrate the university town Santiniketan’s recently-acquired UNESCO World Heritage site status will finally die down.
The Union Ministry of Education has sent a detailed text, in English and Hindi, for new plaques to the university authorities that mentions Rabindranath Tagore’s contribution and does not contain the names of either the chancellor, Prime Minister Narendra Modi or the former vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty. The letter containing the text was received by VBU on Tuesday, November 14.
The new plaques will replace the old ones. The earlier plaques had generated a huge controversy after it came to light that they had the names of the prime minister and the then vice-chancellor but not the bard who made Santiniketan into the world-famous centre of learning that it is today.
The three plaques installed at three locations on the campus had the dateline of “September, 2023” but first came to the national limelight when Trinamool Congress’ Rajya Sabha MP, and former Union Culture Ministry secretary, Jawhar Sircar tweeted on them on October 20, including a picture as well.
Politicians cutting across party lines and the general public had demanded that new ones be placed in place of those installed, which would celebrate Tagore and not Modi or Bidyut Chakrabarty.
Trinamool Congress, the ruling party in Bengal, has claimed credit for this development, with its leaders saying that it is the result of the challenge mounted by the party on the instructions of the party Chairperson and Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee.
“Established in rural West Bengal in 1901 by the great Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore, Santiniketan was a cradle of learning and education firmly rooted in India’s classical traditions, aspiring to a concept of university humanity,” reads a part of the text for the plaques.
As per the directions of the ministry, VBU has also formed a six-member committee of experts to translate the text into Bengali. The committee also has the right to suggest changes to the English and Hindi texts, if needed.
The committee comprises Amal Pal, acting director of culture, VBU, who is also the head, four of the university’s teachers, namely, Amrit Sen, acting director of the publishing department, Bengali teacher Manabendra Mukhopadhyay, Hindi teacher Shakuntala Mishra and history teacher Anil Kumar, and Nilanjan Bandyopadhyay, special officer at Rabindra Bhavana.
It needs to be noted that the present BJP-led Union government of Narendra Modi and the university vice-chancellor Bidyut Chakrabarty, whose five-year term ended on November 8, have been accused over the years by parties of various hues and people from all corners of the country of trying to saffronise the campus through the promotion of right-wing thoughts and activities. Such an approach, however, runs counter to the liberal ethos of Tagore and, by extension, of Visva-Bharati University and the university town of Santiniketan.
Professor Chakrabarty especially has been in the news for all the wrong reasons—from accusing and terminating colleagues for opposing his various actions and decisions, which many think are an anathema to what the university stands for, to suspending students for protesting his decisions to famously trying to forcibly take away from Professor Amartya Sen a part of the property on which stands his ancestral house (and where he was brought house), which Chakrabarty and his supporting clique in the university administration say was illegally acquired.
Professor Chakrabarty is widely believed to have been the mouthpiece of Narendra Modi, who has been notably silent all through these controversies despite being the chancellor, on the basis of his holding the post of prime minister.
