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Visva-Bharati notice to professor after FIR filed against vice chancellor
The professor has not responded to the show-cause notice yet, said the Visva-Bharati spokesperson hours before the three-day deadline ends
KOLKATA: Visva-Bharati, West Bengal’s only central university, on Monday issued show cause notice to a senior professor for filing a police complaint against vice-chancellor (V-C) Bidyut Chakrabarty accusing him of insulting the Bengali community in a post that was uploaded on the institution’s website on August 20.
“The undersigned is directed by the Upacharya (V-C) to request you to explain why disciplinary action will not be taken against you for such an act of yours. Your reply should reach the undersigned within three days from the date of issue of this letter,” said the show-cause notice issued by the acting registrar’s office to Sudipta Bhattacharya, a senior professor of economics on September 4. HT has reviewed a copy of the notice.
“As far as I know, Bhattacharya has not yet responded to the letter,” Mahua Banerjee, the Visva-Bharati spokesperson told HT on Thursday evening, hours before the deadline ends.
Bhattacharya, who is also the president of the Visva-Bharati University Faculty Association (VBUFA), did not reveal his next step.
The controversial post, which ran into a few thousand words, was an analysis of the incidents of ragging on various college and university campuses. In the post, the Bengali community was called hypocrite and also compared to crabs, Bhattacharya alleged in his police complaint lodged on August 31.
Based on the complaint, a first information report (FIR) was registered on the same day by the Santiniketan police station in Bengal’s Birbhum district, where the university is located.
Bidyut Chakrabarty has been booked under sections 504 and 505 (2) of the Indian Penal Code (IPC).
The FIR was lodged weeks after VBUFA started raising funds to meet legal expenses for numerous cases lodged by faculty members, students and non-teaching staff against the university since 2018 when Chakrabarty took over as V-C.
The authorities reacted to the move and issued a general notification on August 16, calling VBUFA an unauthorized organization without naming it. “Nobody, i.e. teaching and non-teaching employees and students who are associated with Visva-Bharati, is allowed to raise any funds on behalf of any unauthorized organization for any purpose without prior approval from the competent authority of the university. Otherwise, the university will be compelled to take appropriate action against the concerned person(s),” said the notice.
On September 5, VBUFA sent an e-mail to the V-C, challenging the notice. The e-mail sent by six professors including Bhattacharya said VBUFA was collecting funds to fight court cases against the V-C’s illegal actions and dared the university to take action.
“The Hon’ble Courts have quashed your illegal actions as the vice-chancellor of Visva-Bharati, put on record very strong comments and imposed huge fines. We demand that you pay the fines….,” it said
The campus has witnessed a number of agitations following the suspension of teachers, non-teaching staff and students since 2018.
A section of Bengal’s prominent intellectuals has also demanded removal of the V-C for insulting economist Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate, during the ongoing row over the university’s claim on part of the leased land covered by Sen’s ancestral home on the campus. The matter is being heard by a district court following Calcutta high court’s orders.
Bhattacharya’s services were summarily terminated in December 2022, but the order was revoked by the high court in January this year, holding that “stigmatic aspersions” led to the summary termination. “Prima facie, it appears that though the petitioner is a permanent ‘adhyapak’ (professor) the university sought to throw him out by termination of his service following the decision of the executive council taken completely behind his back levelling various stigmatic aspersions against him,” the order said
In February, the high court’s division bench upheld a single bench order that imposed a ₹1 lakh fine on Visva-Bharati for initiating disciplinary action against Debotosh Sinha, a professor from the social work department, who recommended child care leave for a teacher in 2021.
On March 15 this year, the high court also set aside a 2020 order of the university to stop two increments of Tathagata Choudhuri, a biotechnology professor, for quarrelling with a colleague over setting up a small laboratory space below the staircase of a campus building.
