Judge me on my work in a year: JNU VC Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit amid backlash

Terming it as a “conspiracy” against her, the first woman VC of JNU Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit said she has not been active on Twitter for the last six years

Newly appointed vice-chancellor (VC) of Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit on Wednesday said that the “Twitter campaign” against her made her look like a “very negative person”, and urged people to judge her based on her performance as the head of the central institution.

Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit, 59, was appointed as the first woman VC of JNU on Monday. (ANI)

Pandit, 59, was appointed as the first woman VC of JNU on Monday. Soon after her appointment, screenshots of tweets posted from an unverified account, @SantishreeD, were circulated on the social media, drawing criticism. The handle, having tweets supporting Nathuram Godse, advocated that funding should be stopped to “communal campuses like Jamia and St Stephen’s”, and terming farmer leaders as “parasitic middlemen”, was deleted soon after that.

Terming it as a “conspiracy” against her, Pandit said she has not been active on Twitter since last six years. “I deactivated my Twitter account six years ago on my daughter’s advice. Soon after my appointment, somebody hacked the old account and morphed the tweets,” she said.

She said the morphed tweets were an attempt to build a narrative against her. When asked about her statement reported in the media that she never had a Twitter account’, Pandit said, “Six years in a long period”.

“The so-called posts that have emerged now are not mine… I’ve got to know from very reliable sources that was done to set a narrative against me,” the JNU VC said.

When asked if she would like to inquire about the matter or file a police complaint, she said, “I do not want to drag it further. I will treat it as an unfortunate incident. This Twitter campaign has made me look very negative, which is not true… Ask my students after one year and they will tell you who I am. I want to work now, so that one year from now people can judge me based on my performance.”

Appreciating JNU for being a politically active campus, Pandit said, “It’s a unique nature of the university. It distinguishes it from other campuses and I would like to maintain that.”

She also rejected allegations that subscribe to a particular ideology, and added that she believed in “inclusivity”.

“I come from three states. I was born in the former Soviet Union, stayed in Tamil Nadu and later moved to Maharashtra because my husband is from there. My parents had an inter-caste marriage in 1956. I will never discriminate against anyone. I want to run an inclusive, faculty and student friendly administration,” she said.

Pandit said that she wants to take JNU to new academic heights and research excellence. “In the next few years, we will go global. We will launch an online platform where the lectures of our excellent faculty will be available and anyone from across the globe will be able to access them,” she said.

When asked about the controversy over her facing action after an inquiry found her guilty for not following rules while granting admission to PIO (Persons of India Origin) students in Savitribai Phule Pune University, Pandit said, “Was there any FIR against me? Those people who make these allegations should produce some proof to back it. Nothing was proved against me,” she said.

Officials at the Pune University where Pandit was a professor of politics since 1992, however, confirmed that they had informed the Union ministry of education about Pandit being penalised after a committee in 2009 found her guilty of violating UGC and AICTE norms. “We provide the factual record whenever we get any vigilance inquiry from the ministry. It was done in this case as well,” said a senior varsity official.